Tradewind's
Underwater Video Filming Tips
Read about the
The story of the sinking of HMSNZ "Tui"
20 February, 1999, in Tutukaka, New Zealand
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Tips
& Tricks for Underwater Filming
(Article first published in Dive New Zealand April 1998)
Entering water with the camera
There is not one correct and only way to enter the water. But let us take some scenarios.
Entering from small boat.
This usually involves a back roll, and it is not convenient to have a U/W camera rig to
look after in the process. You will need access to your BC; you need a hand holding your
mask, and the camera rig will be in the way. Therefore, get someone in the boat to hand it
down to you once you are ready to dive. Explain to the person in the boat how you want him
or her to hold the camera, and perhaps point out the sensitive bits that you don't want
knocked in any way.
Small boat, choppy seas or even big waves:
You don't want to hang around on the surface, you will want to descend immediately you hit
the water. Back roll with one hand on your mask and the other hand holding the camera.
Hold the camera rig away from you so you don't get hit by it, somehow, while entering.
Big boat:
You walk off a platform on the stern with one hand on the mask and the other
holding on to the camera housing stretching it away from your body. Unless you need to
stay in the surface for some reason, you descend immediately. Everything is much more
controllable and steady once you are diving and have got your buoyancy sorted out.
Underwater
video colours.
The water mass works just like any other filter we put between the source of light and
what we are looking at; and at the same time like a filter between our eyes and the object
of interest.
In the television studio we can change the colour of light
with a variety of gels, coloured plastic sheets. Yellow gel in front of the lights give us
a warm yellow colour tone on the set. Similarly a blue gel will cool the set in a bluish
hue.
And if you put on a pair of blue sunglasses, yes, let us state the obvious, everything
looks blue ... logics, really.
Underwater the sunlight, whether direct or diffused by
clouds, penetrates through the water surface and hits a fish or a piece of coral or
another diver. The fact that we can see anything down there is because the sun is lighting
them. As said above, the water filters out a lot of the colours in the sunlight.
The deeper you go the less colour, the analogy is putting more and more blue gel in front
of a light in the television studio.
Video cameras have a particularly nasty way of reacting to the change of light. They seem
to record things in completely blue or green hues, everything gets more monochrome and
bluish than it really is.
A way of getting around this problem to some degree is to
compensate for the loss of colours by inserting a so-called "red-filter" (in
most cases) in front of the lens of the camera. Depending on conditions this will actually
often put some colour back into the shot. Back to the analogy: You are wearing blue
sunglasses, everything looks blue. Now put a pair of orange or red glasses in front of the
blue ones, and, surprise, the colours come back. (Some of them at least).
The red filter is a help, but must be used with caution:
 | Near the surface, (how near depends on conditions), the filter "overcompensates" and your footage will look yellowish or too red. |
| The further away your object is, the less effect the filter will have - and vice versa. |
| When shooting close up shots and using lights, the filter can either over-saturate the colours or outright distort them. |
| External filters (those you fit on the dome port or wide angle lens) can pick up small air bubbles when you are not using them. The tiny bubbles stick to the surface of the filter. A couple of waves with a hand will flow them off. It is really important to check this, as you are likely to see the bubbles as small spots on your screen afterwards. |
| If you have a monochrome (black and white) viewfinder, remember that the picture looks exactly the same with or without the filter on. It is really important that you remember to use it and remove it. Make it a routine always to check if the filter is ON or OFF for every shot you take |
| If you use a Digital Video camera which can manually white-balance like the Sony VX1000 or Panasonic's EZ1, then try to do a white balance on a white slate without the filter on. This is sometimes sufficient to get the colours out. |
Filter use is often a personal choice and there are lots of
variables to consider:
Is it a cloudy day or bright sunshine up top?
At what angle is the sun during the dive?
Are you in tropical or tempered waters?
How deep are you?
Is the visibility great, good, average or really bad?
Are you using lights?
How far away is the object of interest?
Are you shooting a combined close-up foreground with a distant background?
Experience is the best way to find out what works best for you, but hopefully the above is a help to get started.
Use
of lights.
If you go to the expense of buying an underwater housing you should seriously
consider also spending money on lights. Underwater lights come in many shapes and forms,
and are normally mounted on arms on top of the housing.
When is the right time to use the lights?
Lights should almost inevitably be used for close-up shots. With close-ups you
want all the colour and detail you can get, and therefore lights are needed. If you have
two lights you have the option of only using one. This can give more interesting shadows
and can make the object stand out better. However, if the scene is deep and quite dark two
lights will almost inevitably give you a better result. Again a personal choice, you have
to make for yourself!
When filming other divers or models lights are useful. The colours of dive gear
look completely different under water and people's skin tones seem to disappear. Lights
can fix that. Also, often you will want to film some marine life like corals or fish
schools placed between camera and model. You will need your lights to get the colours out
on these pictures.
If you do wall dives on coral reefs you are likely to go beyond the depth where
sunlight lets you see colours. The only way to see the colours on a coral wall is by
turning your lights on. Even if you had no camera you can use a small hand lamp or torch,
and you will see colours otherwise totally hidden in the deep blue. For example, a fan
coral will normally look black to the naked eye, - and to the camera. Switch your lights
on, and the fan stands out in all its glory in glowing read. That's what you are missing
without the lights.
Should we state the obvious? Night dives and cave dives. Lights are incredibly
helpful.
In fact, as lots of divers know very well, the best way to see the colours of the
underwater world is to do it at night.The colours come out as you would expect them,
because you are controlling the light source, and there is only a short distance from the
source of light to the object you are filming.
Steady
camera shots
You don't have a tripod (not normally, anyway) and you are not holding on to anything. You
are floating around subject to the forces of currents, swell, surge and gravity as well as
your own movements. This is a recipe for very difficult shooting conditions.
So how do you get it right?
Don't use the zoom. Long lens shots shake, that's a fact. If you need to
see something closer, you'll need to get closer with the camera.
Make your moves soft and steady. You should not be working very hard at all during a dive.
Get your buoyancy right. It is very hard to get steady shots if you are
going up and down like a yo yo with buoyancy problems.
Breathe slowly.Get used to a slow drawn-out breathing rhythm.This helps your buoyancy but
also your body movements in general.
Sometimes: Hold your breath. This goes against all we learn during dive
courses, yes, but sometimes it is the only way to get a shot that is absolutely rock
steady and which lasts for some time. By holding your breath your buoyancy does not change
at all and this is a help. Holding your breath can also be necessary if you are shooting
straight up and you don't want your bubbles in the shot.
Use Steadyshot. This is a unique feature of Sony cameras. Only use steady
shot which is optical. For example on Panasonic's EZ1 DV camera you cannot use the steady
shot, because it is steadying your shot by moving pixels around. This is clearly visible,
and it doesn't look good.
Use
of viewfinder
Whether you can use your viewfinder or not depends on the housing configuration you have.
It goes from one extreme to the other: On some housings it is so hard to see the
viewfinder that it is better to learn just to point the camera at the action and keep it
on a wide shot. Many domestic video cameras have a poor and small sized viewfinder, so if
the housing does not have a magnifying glass or a lens of some sort, you can virtually
give up using the viewfinder.
Other housings have space for an LCD screen on the back,
and this is a really good option, both because you get a colour picture and one which is
bigger than the normal tiny viewfinder screen on the camera.
However, be careful near the surface: The LCD display just does not like sunshine and you
can forget about seeing anything on a bright day near the surface unless you have screens
around the LCD display to keep direct sunlight away from it.
It is a great advantage to be able to use the viewfinder of your camera, on the other hand, you should also learn to "point and shoot" without necessarily depending on the viewfinder.
Filming of models / other divers
This can be a nightmare, but it can also be a lot of fun.
The key words are preparation and communication.
Preparation: If possible at all: know the dive site. Plan
the shots you would like. try to compose the shots during your reckie dive. Bring a slate
with you to take notes, if necessary. Think of the sun: will it be in the same position
related to the shots you want, once the real shoot starts?
Before the photo dive commences, brief everyone involved so they know the shots required,
the order in which you plan to shoot them and so that each and every model, assistant and
dive buddy knows exactly what he or she is supposed to do. Bring several slates with you
down.
Communication: Agree to some basic signs for your dive, but
don't use the standard diving signs for new meanings. On a film set, for example the sign
meaning "I am out of air" is frequently used to indicate "CUT", and
you don't want any misunderstandings!!
You can have signs for "standby", "rolling", "action",
"cut", "one more take" etc.
If you have assistants with lights etc you need to give special instructions to them, and
you must make sure that you can communicate with them as well.
Some people use underwater voice communications gear; we don't as we consider it too
technical and also very expensive given the number of people involved in shoots.
Once you have your preparations and communications sorted out, do your dive. Depending on what you are doing, the models will be used in different manners. If you are shooting seascapes or corals or fish, get the model to involve him or herself in the natural life. Make them look at a fan coral, studying it, don't let them pose and look straight at the camera. On the other hand, if your are shooting a model showing off some new dive gadget, the model can obviously do whatever he or she needs to do for the camera.
Remember the old rules for live pictures (film/video):
| Keep your centerline defined and don't reverse the action by crossing the line. You can reverse the action by having the subject coming straight at the camera or moving away. After such shots you are free to have the subject come back into frame from either side. |
| Consider getting point-of-view shots (POVs), they come in very handy during editing later |
| Plan for edit points such as into frame or out of frame |
| Don't pan or zoom unless you have to. |
| Get cutaways: a wide shot of someone with a fan coral, get a cutaway with the face close up looking at the same coral. |
| Cutaways are essential if you are shooting several models at the same time: One person is signalling to the other: don't forget a cutaway with the second person looking at the first one - and vice versa. |
| If possible, get a foreground as well as a background. The foreground can just be a piece of something, a rock, a fish, a kelp, a coral, whatever. The background is setting the scene, this is the important part - unless of course the foreground is the central part of your shot and your model is in the background looking at that fan coral. |
Autofocus / Manual focus
The main problem with autofocus under water is that it has problems finding what to lock
on to. The result is that most autofocus systems "hunt", that is they move back
and forth between various focus distances, and this does not look good on screen.
Therefore, always use manual focus.
A lot of divers use housings where you cannot turn the focus ring on the lens. Often these
housings will have an ON/OFF button for autofocus.
The solution is then to momentarily turn autofocus on, while you point at whatever you
want to shoot. The camera will then focus and once it has done so you can switch the
autofocus off again. The camera will now keep the focus distance you just set. This
procedure is useful when you want to change from a medium or long shot to a macro or
extreme close up.
At all other times though, it should not be necessary to change focus at all. You will
normally be shooting with a wide setting on the camera, and almost inevitably your shot
will be in focus.
Use of zoom function
A good rule: Don't zoom. Full stop.
Stay wide and if you want a closer shot, move closer to the action yourself. So your body
with the camera serve as the zoom function.
Why not zoom? You can't keep the camera still, so your shots will be shaky and unusable.
You are likely to loose your focus. And zooms in general are not that nice (personal
opinion, yes). If you want to get a closer shot of something, then cut the take, move
closer, and roll the camera again. Our eyes do not zoom, they re-focus. The zoom function
is really only justified if you have something you want to reveal, and then it is mostly a
zoom-out you want to do.
If for example you have a fish sitting on the bottom next to a cave entry you could perhaps defend a shot starting on the fish, then zooming out in the moment someone is coming out of the cave.
A rule of thumb in filming is: don't create the action with the camera, let the action happen in your frame. If there is no action, then move the camera, and start again.
Under most conditions it is not necessary to use the
exposure control. Modern cameras - especially the new DV cameras - are quite clever at
figuring out what is the best exposure.
There are exceptions, though. Here are some examples:
| Shooting divers from the deep up against the sun |
| shooting out or up towards the light from a tunnel, a shaft, a chimney, a hole |
| shooting an object which is backlit by a source of light which may or may not be in your frame |
| shooting other people with lights |
Under all these conditions the exposure control can come in handy. The automatic circuit in the camera will close the exposure due to the light conditions, but in closing the iris you loose your picture. Because what you want to see correctly exposed is the diver, not his light; the object in your frame, not the backlight; the divers or fish out at the opening of the tunnel, not the bright light at the end - etc.
Note that not all housings allow you to access exposure
control.
If you are looking for a new housing, preferably get one which gives you this option.
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