Rebecca Douglas

How is the process of preparing for an underwater shoot different to preparing for, say, an above-water shoot that’s still in a natural location?

There’s a lot of prep work that needs to be done. It all starts probably two days out, looking at the forecast for sea conditions, weather conditions and just starting to kind of map what might happen, and then looking at kind of local conditions. And so best laid plans with underwater can often… while nature’s got other ideas. If there’s algae blooms or, you know, the kind of the swell forecast isn’t what you’d expected it to be, so everything gets churned up. And then in terms of the equipment, you’ve got kind of two arms set really with your camera equipment and then the equipment you are going to be using to protect yourself in the water.

So, summertime is much easier because I usually go in in a rash vest, which means then I can swim up to jellyfish without any fear of getting stung, and then I kind of ramp up as the temperature drops through the year to a five-mil [millimetre] wetsuit. And then the one I’ve mentioned where it’s the seven-mil slip process of getting into the wetsuit. And then, yes, snorkel fins. And the most important thing is always having warm hands and feet. Even in summer, I’ll probably wear five-mil boots and gloves just so that I don’t feel that temperature as quickly in the water. The other thing for me health-wise is making sure that I’m really, really hydrated, and I actually take now a little backpack with a water bladder in.

So that’s kind of all the prep work for me and what I’m going to wear. And then in terms of the camera equipment, I’ve got an underwater housing made by Sea Frogs, and I also have then my Fuji X-T5, so it’s mirrorless cameras that I use underwater. And so, you have to take all of the silicone seals out, they’ve got O-rings in them, clean them all, clean where they were, and then use silicone to lube them so that then they have a sort of protective layer. So, when you open the underwater housing, there’s one round the one half of it, and one round the other. So you have to take all of those out. And then you do the same with the dome where the dome, the big glass dome you see on the front attaches. You have to unscrew that and take all of those out and lube the parts there. So, making sure that you’ve checked all of those things.

And then there’s intricacies with then making a decision about how I’m going to shoot in the water. So, it depends on the time of day because my Fuji cameras have the aperture ring, which changes, like, how much light will come in and out of the camera’s lens, actually on the lens in an old-school analogue kind of style. So, I have to literally turn a ring. And I don’t have anything within the housing system that will turn those. I can only use ISO and shutter speed to then start exposing the shot. So, I have to kind of make that decision about aperture before I get in the water because if you open the dome with any moisture, it will cause misting inside the dome. And so, it is really hard once you are actually wet to do anything inside the housing. So yeah, making sure batteries are really charged, making sure you’ve got very big memory cards that are formatted before you start going.