There’s Never a Blue Monday when You’re Underwater

There’s never a blue moment when you’re underwater, unless of course you’re using the wrong settings in your camera.

So I thought I’d spend my week at home recovering from Covid to run a series of online workshops to help you as much as possible.

But let’s start at the surface with a very controversial mode, the Underwater Mode. It really is one of those “Marmite” moments – some people love it, I swear by it, others totally diss it, and that’s ok too.

I even love using it in the UK (and yes, it would be better as a magenta replacement, so you do need to be careful.

So where does it work and why? Camera manufacturers know that we lose Red really quickly when we’re underwater, so they add this into their Underwater Scene Mode. Just make sure that your flash is switched off to avoid extra pink subjects though.

Where the sun is at it’s strongest, there’s a chance that the surface of the water can appear washed out, so the underwater mode helps to keep your underwater scenes near the surface rich and punchy in colour.

Wide-Angie lenses also naturally let more light into your overall image, so again the underwater mode can help to eliminate this. In the above image taken off Sharm in Egypt it really helped to keep the anthias rich and vibrant in colour

As you go deeper, the effect starts to get less though, so it works up to about 10 ms in depth. After that, you may prefer to use manual white balance or strobes/video lights to replace lost underwater colour.

And that of course is saved for another day 🙂