Underwater photography course

When I started taking underwater photos during my trip to the Maldives earlier this year, I noticed that there is plenty of potential for better pictures. I decided to improve my skills and learn from an experienced underwater photographer - and luckily, my local dive shop, TSK in Zurich offered a course. I signed up and was excited to see what the course would be like!

Octopus on its throne

The theory

Kim (we also previously took the drysuit course together) and I met our instructor for the course: Martin Bütikofer. He is an award-winning underwater photographer with many years of experience in creating fantastic underwater pictures.

This made the theory lesson really interesting - we went through the content of the PADI Digital Underwater Photographer manual again, but Martin added a lot of his personal experience on top of that. This was insightful and interesting - he had personal stories, pictures for us to look at and the time just flew by.

We finished the theory session by doing a first briefing for the practical session in the pool.

The pool session

As a repeater for the theory session, we did our dive briefing. Martin would place various objects and plastic animals in the pool. Our tasks were:

take a selfie
take a picture of your buddy
try out different lighting options, perspectives, macro, etc.
try to compose an interesting picture

We jumped in and off we went. There was a variety of subjects to take pictures of in the pool now!

We spend nearly two hours experimenting with lights, macro settings, different perspectives. Martin checks what we are doing, giving us tips and taking breaks with us to discuss what we are doing and answering any questions we have.

I am really happy how the pictures from the course turned out quite great. I removed the first ones I took, because they looked flat and boring. With the right angle and getting into the right lighting situation makes a huge difference.

We also took the opportunity to discuss and experiment with composition and lighting, which was grand.

Thanks again to Kim and Martin for this fun course!