Brent Foster Photography

I’ve had a few emails and questions about the underwater photo shoot that Tammy and I did for our maternity photos recently in a local pool here in Wallaceburg.
Because of that, I’ve decided to bring back my “How I Took It” series… at least for a post. If you have other images you’ve seen of mine, and would like me to break them down into amazingly detailed diagrams, please do let me know!

As mentioned in the original blog post, Tammy and I really wanted our shoot to stand out. We wanted something unique that we hadn’t tried before.
After our initial decision to go underwater with the shoot, we began to conceptualize what the images may look like, and what it would take to make them.
We bought a Ewa Marine Housing from B&H Photo in New York after reading many, many reviews, rented the local pool, and off we went!

This shoot proved to be so much more challenging then we had anticipated for a few reasons. I had not thought at all about how damn hard it is to see through a plastic housing underwater while treading and trying to keep focus. Tammy had totally overlooked the fact that she wasn’t all that comfortable underwater for more then a couple seconds at a time. She also now had this thing(baby Cohen) in her belly that really wanted to float. On top of that, we had decided to drop in a black backdrop in the water. We totally overlooked the fact the jets would keep shooting the backdrop away from the wall. This required a lot of little weights to hold it down.

Our biggest challenge however was the lighting. We had planned and prepared to use pocket wizards(radio triggers) to fire the Alien Bee lights that were up on the deck down into the water. The wizards worked just fine until I brought the antenna underwater. As soon as they were submerged, they would not fire, thus, limiting me to only going underwater with the camera itself, but only far enough that the trigger stayed just above the water.

In the end, we were very happy with our first attempt at underwater photography, and we can’t wait to apply this to a destination wedding where we can photograph an underwater trash the dress session in the Ocean!

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Daylia, the aspiring photographer and my assistant Gerald

Below is one of the “most voted” images from our original blog post. You can also see the entire underwater photo session HERE.

Camera Settings:

ISO: 200
Aperture: 8
Shutter: 1/125
White Balance: Flash

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