Guide to Underwater Photography
Thank you for visiting the Guide to Digital Underwater Photography written by Scott Gietler. This online book is a complete underwater photography tutorial & class for beginners and advanced photographers, full of underwater photography tips and examples. Registration is always nice, and sign up for our monthly newsletter. Please email me if you found the guide useful. Join our Facebook group or follow on Twitter.
Also check out my new underwater photography blog.
Advanced photographers should check out the extensive underwater composition course, with many tutorials and lessons on various tips, techniques & scenarios.
Most popular chapters of the guide:
- Beginner's Guide
- Underwater photography basics & tips for the beginner underwater photographer
- Underwater Camera Selection Guide
- Best choices for digital Compacts and dSLR cameras. Comparison charts of cameras.
- Lens Selection Guide for underwater
- Best lenses for digital underwater photography, including Nikon, Canon, Olympus & comparison charts. Here's a page on Inon Wet Lenses.
- Camera settings underwater
- Exposure, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, Raw vs Jpeg, Macro & Wide-angle settings.
- Underwater Lighting
- Strobes, strobe position diagrams, backscatter, filters, color, ambient light, hot spots, getting good blues, underwater flashes
- Dive Destinations
- The best dive destinations for underwater photography
- Basic Underwater Composition
- Composition Tips, Rule of thirds, diagonal lines, artistic shots, sunbursts, sharks
- Special underwater compositions
- Close-focus wide angle, silhouettes, wrecks, reflections, black & white, snell's window, with tips and technique.
- Black backgrounds
- How to achieve black backgrounds, including settings, tips and strobe position.
- Creative underwater shooting
- Blue backgrounds, panning, zooming, backlighting, rear curtain sync
- Artistic underwater compositions
- Using colors, patterns, textures, selective colorization and special digital effects for artistic compositions.
- Supermacro Underwater Photography
- Equipment for supermacro photography including technique, tips, wet and dry diopters, teleconverters, and lens choices
- Shooting great underwater Macro photographs
- Choosing subjects, composition, tips, the right moment, lighting, and settings
- Wide Angle Underwater Photography
- Technique, settings, equipment, subject choices, tips and examples
- Fish Photography
- Guide to photographing fish underwater
- Photographing Marine Behavior
- Feeding, mating, cleaning, laying eggs, fighting, predation
- Underwater housing maintenance
- Setup, o-rings, floods, on the boat, cleaning lenses
- Underwater Photography Tips
- Over 60 underwater photography tips for beginners and advanced photographers. Here's our underwater video tips.
Feel free to leave a comment or ask a question by contacting me. Look for "add new comment" at the bottom of each page.
All content and photos copyright by Scott Gietler unless otherwise noted. Some of the photos on this site are contributed by other people who want to share their love of underwater photography.
Scott, you are a whizz. Unbelievably quick response. I had no sooner posted my challenge and I had an answer back asking me a few questions and then a more detailed response to assist with the said "challenges". Thanks so much. Now to put your suggestions into practice. I'll definitely be bookmarking your site so I can keep coming back to "learn" AND... this is one site that I will DEFINITELY recommend to my diving underwater photography friends. Cheers - K
Great resource Scott, it will take weeks to get through all the information. Will recommend the site to all my camera clinic students.
Regards
Nigel
As a proud sponsor of Underwater Photography Guide, I couldn't be more thrilled to see the launch! We have a small but growing group of budding u/w photographers who are excited about the website too. Go Scott go!
Congratulations on launching the site! It's a terrific resource. I only wish you had created it a few years earlier so I could have had it available when I was first starting out. I'm proud to appear on your Bali Destination page!
Thanks,
Scott
Great job with the website, Scott! And you continue to add more and more helpful information - tons of great tips that can photographers with any level of experience. I find the site a great reference that I keep coming back to time and time again.
Thank you for sharing your experience with others so that they may improve their skills and get more enjoyment from capturing the beauty of the underwater world and its creatures.
I am thrilled to have discovered this website!
For the first time in 20 years I'll be doing UW photography and for the first time using a digicam.
Even armed with Photoshop I was worried how I was going to avoid completely making a mess of my shots.
Thank you!
It's about time someone made a website like this! The information here is invaluable, especially to people like me that are just starting their journey in UW photography. Excellent work by you and all the contributing photographers as well; the images on this site are truly stunning and does an excellent job at illustrating and validating the articles and advice. Thanks and keep up the great work!
As a beginning UW photographer, I have found this to be a FANTASTIC resource. Aside from private lessons, I could not ask for a better guide. I have found an answer to all of my questions/inquiries so far, in this guide. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and thoughts!
Excellent work, Scott.
A most valuable resource for all. Every underwater photographer should bookmark this site.
Thank you for all the hard work.
Alex
Many thanks for this comprehensive guideline on how to run underwaterphotography.
With this "manual" will serve provide both purposes, a basic information for the ones to get started and on what to take care on, as well as an excellent Buddy to improve yourself, no matter how experienced you are.
Many, many tips on equiment and how to create a photo best are included and illustrated by examples.
Excellent done!
Many thanks
Uwe
Scott- Thank you SO much for starting and maintaining this website. It is full of wonderful information that was previously hard to find online! It is extremely kind of you to share your knowledge and wisdom free of charge to help others improve their underwater photography skills. As stated by a previous viewer, I would recommend that you publish a book with this information. It would serve nicely as a travel companion I wouldn't leave home without :-)Thanks again!!
Now that is what I call a useful and fantastic website.
Scott - thank you so much for this great job.
I am sure that uwphotographyguide.com will have all the succes that it deserves.
Great infos, fantastic tips (that I use (and try) often during my photo-dives) and a very easy site to navigate into.
Like I always say : "Que du bonheur".
See you in Switzerland.
Michel...:O)...
Hi, love the site, wish i found it before i left a week ago, but still got some great pictures out of my camera at St. Eustatius (Statia).
There great tips here, but isnt it a idea to add a chapter regarding photoshop improvements, lots of ppl dont have a clue how to simply enhance there pictures by adjusting colortone, saturation, brightness and selective colorenhancement.
keep up the great work!!!
Thank you very much!
This is a great one-stop shop for accurate knowledge and valuable advice in all the important areas of underwater photography. You've done a great job here, Sko-T!
Thank you very much for sharing this. This is a very informative guide, and I learned some new things from it. I would suggest that you also turn this into a book. I would purchase one of these just to take it along with me when I go to take UW pictures. Thanks again.
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