Is underwater photography actually possible without a strobe? using the right camera?

[yaronad]

Is underwater photography actually possible without a strobe?
Using the right camera/ sensor size?

Look at this video, with the Sony a6000 >> Auto Focus in Low Light
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NS2YWSKi6U

The results are pretty amazing on a completely dark room....


So with Cameras like the Sony A6000 or Full frame cameras like the Sony A7?
what do you think the underwater results should be, with low light and the no red colours....?

 

[Ran Mozaik]

Focus technology and low light capabilities are improving significantly, and soon you might be able to shoot a wedding without strobes at all, but the nature of light is not planning on changing any time soon. Colors will always diminish as you go deeper underwater and the only way to bring them back will always be artificial light. Whether it's a video light for videos or flash for stills, you will always get better and colorful results with lights.
The technological improvements are awesome though!!

 

[KeithG]

it depends upon how deep you go and the visibility. under some conditions a filter (or post processing) can help to restore proper color balance. but it can not bring back colors that are absent.

deep water and "low light" as per the video are not the same condition. as you decend the water filters out certain colors. they are gone. they become black. all colors are not affected the same so this is not simply a low light situation. it is a "some colors dissappear first" situation.

my wet suit is red and black. at 90 feet in the caribbean it is all black. no type of passive filter or post processing will allow you to determine which parts of my "now all black" wetsuit should be red. the red color is gone. there is still sufficient ambient light to capture an image, but there will not be any red in the image. all black parts are black, all red parts are black. they are the same color.

add a strobe and all of a sudden the red parts are red again!

 

[Akimbo]

Some of most inspiring underwater photographs I have ever seen only use available light. For examples, Google: ernie brooks photography

Edit: Chuck's available light work is pretty amazing as well:
Chuck Davis - Tidal Flats Ltd.: Photography & Cinematography

 

[haha49]

The right settings will make the biggest difference. If you take a Nikon D800 or D4s and throw on a Nikon 14-24mm AFS f/2.8 G ED lense and take a picture with 2 second exposure at night just by holding it. It turns the night into day that's how much difference it makes. Now you have to hold for 2 seconds and you get light flares in the shot which look really neat for landscape night shots. The right lense, camera and settings is key. You can do good on cheaper stuff but once you get something better it's just snap I'm done.

When you shoot underwater it's a whole differen't ball game. you might want to get a focus light just so your camera can focus then 1 or 2 strobes to light the subject it all depends on what you want to shoot. You can get by with good lighting in shallow water and using filters help allot. I mean you can get ok shots just using a gopro and a filter. If you take the gopro and take a snapshot of a video then you have a lower quality photo but it can be good enough and you don't miss any action. So that's an option do you want something to point and shoot or would you rather shoot everything then take snap shots. The photo by it self is way better but for posting online the snapshot is good enough. So what do you do with your photos matter.

 

[klausi]

It makes a big difference what you are shooting. Macro -almost never, even though you can even pull that off in some cases.

Wide angle: definitely. Sometimes you have to do it, when the animals you are shooting are light sensitive, like thresher sharks. Then a large ISO setting, hopefully with a large camera sensor, help. Check it out:

 

[Storker]

Some of most inspiring underwater photographs I have ever seen only use available light. For examples, Google: ernie brooks photography

Thanks for the tip, I didn't know about Ernie Brooks. Fascinating.

Most, if not all, of Ernie Brooks' photos that Google links to, are in B&W, and that's rather telling. B&W elegantly circumvents the most obvious issue with ambient light UW photography: the lack of reds and yellows, but it's also another way of taking pictures. Lacking color for accent, more emphasis must be put on shades, light, lines and shapes when composing the image. Some subjects, typically those with clean lines or shapes really do better in B&W than in color, since the color detracts from the cleanliness of the composition. The same effect can of course be obtained in a monochrome color image, like klausi's thresher shark. Monochrome is monochrome, regardless of whether the "color" is black/white, black/blue or black/green.

As an old film fart who has spent quite a few hours in the darkroom, I have a very sweet spot in my heart for B&W photography, and thus also for monochrome of course. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find many underwater subjects that naturally lend themselves to B&W. At least not yet...

Here's one I chose to convert to B&W:


Some taken in ambient light, basically monochrome:

 

[lemke]

Big aperture lens (2.8 or larger) and longer shutter speed. Has nothing to do with sensor size.

 

[Akimbo]

… Some taken in ambient light, basically monochrome:…

Agreed. One of the nice things about digital is the ease of shifting murky greens to vivid blues in post processing. The sensors are much more tolerant of low light levels now than B&W films so you can more easily capture dominate blue images with B&W-like gray scales.

The nice thing about wide angle available light digital is you can shoot manual focus with auto-exposure and concentrate on composition.

 

[Storker]

One of the nice things about digital is the ease of shifting murky greens to vivid blues in post processing.

"Murky greens"? Bah. "Vivid blues"? Humbug.

I give you vivid greens:


And murky blues:



More seriously, why color-shift the image completely? This idea that underwater scenes "must" be blue isn't reality for us who regularly dive cold-temperate waters. There is no picture police, just as there is no scuba police, so it's up to each photog to decide how much they want to change their picture in post. Me, I like my pictures to reflect what I "saw" when I pressed the shutter, so a complete color shift isn't something I'd do unless I'm in an experimental mood.

Now, what I "see" isn't necessary the same as what is captured on my camera's sensor, so color balancing, vignetting, cropping, selective blurring and sharpening, dodging, burning, B&W conversion and even moderate cloning are tools I use to make my camera's recording represent what my inner eye "saw" when I pressed the shutter button. But although I might color-balance an image to show the well-lit blue-green scene I "saw" instead of the darkish green scene my camera recorded, I don't think I'd change my pictures' color tone from all-green to all-blue. That just doesn't feel right for me and my images.

Besides, I think the green color of cold-temperate waters is pretty nice:

(this one is taken with a strobe, I admit that)