A Shell of a Good Time: Recapping Kyalami's 1st Underwater Photography Workshop
We had a great group for our 1st ever underwater photography workshop!
In June we held our 1st ever Underwater Photography Workshop - something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time, and I’m so proud I finally was able to make it happen. While the workshop required quite a bit of prep work ahead of time (I did pull together a 49-page PowerPoint presentation with all my original images, whew), it was hands-down one of the most rewarding weekends of my underwater photography career and well worth the effort.
A proud moment for me. I was so grateful for the opportunity to share my love and passion for capturing the ocean’s residents in respectful and creative ways! I believe it’s such an important tool for us to help protect what we love as divers, inspiring non-divers to learn and care about what they don’t experience for themselves 1st hand.
We strategically picked mid-summer for the workshop so we could increase our likelihood of having ideal shooting conditions and capitalize on peak turtle nesting season. Naturally, we made these incredible animals our subject of focus for the 2-day event. I firmly believe that in order to take a high-quality image of any animal, you need to first invest some time learning about your subject’s behavior. As a result, I ended up partnering with National Save the Sea Turtle Foundation who had a representative come to educate us on several aspects of sea turtle nesting season.
Get to know your subject.
We spent a good portion of the classroom session learning about the behavior of sea turtles. This is not only to increase the likelihood of getting the desired shot, but also helps us to better understand how to respectfully approach and shoot these protected animals.
Our guest speaker from NSTSF, Anna Bennett, helped reinforce what is required from us to be respectful when observing and shooting these animals. Knowing we would primarily encounter resting loggerheads on top of the reef, she shared with us some great reminders regarding the effort these nesting mamas put into migrating to our beaches to lay several clutches of eggs during the season. The resting turtles have expended a lot of energy to reach our shores and it is important to be respectful by approaching slowly, limiting flashes in their face and even better, targeting swimming males rather than resting mamas. As a result of her presentation, I have to say I was so incredibly proud of our group of divers. Each participant was a respectful observant of these amazing animals and still managed to come away with some pretty impressive turtle shots.
We focused on finding actively swimming turtles for our subjects, rather than disrupting resting mamas on top of the reef. Photo student Alec nailed this shot of me swimming alongside this beautiful loggerhead with both great lighting and composition!
As an added bonus, Anna and her partner Dr. Larry Wood joined us on our afternoon dives to conduct some live in-water turtle research. Our workshop participants were awarded the opportunity to get super up close and personal with a hawksbill they brought up to the boat to study and tag. Talk about some hands-on education!
This research and conservation program is associated with the National Save the Sea Turtle Foundation (NSTSF). While hawksbills do not nest on our beaches, they do travel through our waters during their sub-adult years, so we often seen them on dives. We try to share with this great organization any time we spot one on a dive, especially if it is untagged, so they can follow-up with further research. I proudly donated a percentage of my profits from this workshop to this amazing organization.
A few key topics we covered in the classroom sessions:
Getting Started: Buoyancy, gear, manual mode, RAW shooting
Camera Settings: Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO, White Balance
Lighting: Ambient, Video, and Strobes (for restoring color and freezing motion)
Composition: Rule of thirds, fill the frame, eye contact, story-telling, etc
Post-Processing: Lightroom + Photoshop workflow, backscatter removal, color correction
Nerd alert! If it looks like my rig is heavy and I’m struggling to hold it up, I can confirm it indeed is! 27lbs out of the water, yet perfectly neutral at depth thanks to the floats on my strobe arms and the rather large air bubble inside my dome.
dive, dive, DIVE!
We could not have asked for better workshop conditions!
Next up, it was time to get in the water to apply all we learned from a full morning in the classroom. We did 2 dives on the Palm Beach reefs from the afternoon boat, and conditions were amazing! Day 1 was long and full and I was grateful for the help from another on-staff photographer, Princess Margaux as we loving refer to her. She helped me capture some great behind-the-scenes shots of the photographers in action underwater.
For the second day, we began again in the water with 2 more dives in Palm Beach, then concluded the day at the shop for a hands-on post-processing session. I was able to run the students through my full work flow - from importing and culling, to assigning key words and filing into folders. We also edited some images from the earlier dives together. I was feeling rather comfortable with this small group, so I even exposed some of my raw files - gasp! This allowed me to show them exactly from start to finish how I post process an image.
These star students knew to bring their laptops for our hands-on post processing session.
While the days were long, the reward was well worth it. I was so proud to see the stunning images the students walked away with, and best of all, they captured the images in the most respectful way possible. No sea turtles were harmed during this underwater workshop! And that’s exactly how it should be.
Student Richard shared this shot with me after the workshop - a great close-up of the behind-the-scenes action!
If you missed the workshop but you’re ready to dive in with your camera and want some lessons, don’t worry - we have plenty of other options for you to do just that. We regularly offer 1:1 sessions at the world-famous Blue Heron Bridge, which is the perfect place to practice any photography skill. We also have a couple upcoming workshops slated for the fall. 1st up, we will have Shawn Murphy visiting from the cenotes of Mexico leading a 4-day workshop filled with lots of big animal action from goliath to sharks, happening August 8th - 12th. I will also be adding on another mini 2-day workshop similar to the format of this turtle session, only focused on goliath grouper in early September.
So what are you waiting for - get your camera set-up ready to go and let’s go diving!
Hope to see you out there soon,
Grace
And that’s a wrap!
Can’t wait for our next workshop . . . stay tuned for details regarding the upcoming goliath aggregation season!