Shooting Underwater with the Gorgeous Uli

Meet Uli - A gorgeous model from Germany staying down under for the year or so. Its her first time shooting underwater and she's a natural when it comes to posing and the natural challenge we experience shooting in such a difficult environment. She answered to one of my last minute model calls on FB and we quickly got organised to shoot the next day. Something I love about todays state of social media is the ease and speed to form a team in such short notice everytime I want to get creative with any type of shoot. Most of the limitations come in the form of financing my personal creative works and time to shoot them and not the creative talent

The biggest letdown and challenge on my part was with the pool water conditions that day. Been having problems with piping in the solar heating system and I forgot to make sure the pool filter and heater remained off for the day until after the shoot. The reason being is air gets into drawn into the piping system through various means throughout the piping and tubing and pumped into the water as very tiny bubble that cause a haze and dramatically reduce visibility.
It has a size that can seen by the camera and very difficult to fix in post but also difficult to gauge through small screens while shooting.
It takes several hours for these to dissipate back into the air which is time we don't have so we just shot through and hoped for the best that can do enough post processing work on the RAW files. I think we pulled through enough. If shooting commercially a client or for a client the immediate action would be getting on phones calling around for an alternative pool to use - ocean shoots are usually out of the question.

As for backdrops for this shoot we always use the pool blue or a black plastic sheet depending on the outfit combinations and lighting being natural light. Strobe lighting creates additional problems and challenges especially as the ideal location would be above the pool with a complicated triggering mechanism not worth the hassle unless absolutely required.

Equipment used is Canon 5mIII with 16-35mm f4L in Ikelite housing and dome and internal lens correction filter.

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Underwater model shoots is a self funded personal creative art project I do for the sake of creating art and also challenging myself technically to improve as a photographer. Aside from being extremely challenging in all aspects its also one of the most expensive and high risk due to cost of equipment, chance of equipment damage that insurers will not cover, safety for myself and the model/team. Always great to get some feedback, support or help finding sponsors/clients so I can keep these personal projects alive.

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