The Beginners Guide to Underwater Photography launch.
A Day in the Tidal Pool with Argonaut Science.
10 August 2020
By Danel Wentzel
Imagine you are hovering, weightlessly, looking down at the bed of kelp that lies beneath you. You are making your way along one of your favourite dive sites in all of Cape Town, when suddenly...
A seal!
Quickly and effortlessly he zips past you, like a little torpedo. Just as you thought he was gone he makes a return and stays with you and your dive buddies for another 30 minutes, swimming in loops and doing flips right above your head.
After the dive you find yourself wanting to share this incredible, once in a lifetime experience with your friends. But when you look on your camera's LCD screen all your photos look blurry. The Auto setting you had your camera on did not select a high enough shutter speed to capture a snapshot of your new seal friend.
You return home after your dive only with memories and blurry photos, wishing you knew how to perfectly capture this moment.
Avoiding blurry images is one of the challenges Nasreen and Nelson wanted to over come when starting the Beginners Guide to Underwater Photography course. As scientists and passionate ocean lovers they both love taking their cameras out and capturing the shear beauty of the underwater world.
After completing all the course material online, we set out with them over the weekend for a practical session at St. James tidal pool.
"The course gave me all this and helped me to figure out my own camera. " - Dr. Nasreen Peer
What went down:
A happy Nasreen enters the water safely with her camera equipment, takes a test shot and continues to move on to deeper water where she starts her first assignment.
All about perspective.
Nelson spots a nudibranch and swiftly changes his camera settings onto macro.
Not only did Nasreen and Nelson walk away with smiles on their faces and new knowledge about overcoming the challenges we face while taking photos underwater, but we also learnt a lot from these two passionate scientists.
We can't wait to get back in the water and run our next photography course!
Want to start your Underwater Photography journey? Click here to find out how you can start today!