When it comes to underwater photography, shark images are arguably the ones that excite the most. There is something truly fascinating and mesmerizing about these majestic predators that make them a goal for virtually every photographer.
Being big, fast, and agile, good shark images are some of the hardest to take. Unlike, say, nudibranchs and sea slugs, sharks don’t hang around for too long and tend to come at divers in passes. This means you have to be quick and in tune with your camera and its settings, whether a DSLR in a housing or an iPhone in an underwater case, you have to quickly dial in and snap that perfect shark image.
Know Your Sharks And Area
One of the best things to do when taking shark pictures is to study. It would be best if you learned about sharks, their habits, and their behavior patterns. This knowledge translates to better images underwater since you are more familiar with what to look for. Can anticipate specific behavior based on body language and more.
Needless to say, focus on the species you are likely to encounter on your trips and those regularly encountered on the types of dives you do. This knowledge can also play a critical safety role. While specific behavior in one species can mean something harmless in other species, it may indicate the shark is interested in having an investigatory bite of your camera to see if it is edible or not.
These can produce a stunning shot straight into the mouth of a shark. However, on the flip side, it can be quite dangerous, especially when dealing with a larger species like a tiger or bull shark. Knowledge allows you to make these judgments about safety and imagery.
Early on, dive with someone who knows the resident shark populations. This lets you learn their idiosyncrasies at your own pace and get a feel for the local shark population's behaviors.
Stay Shallow
As you begin shark photography, it is always best to target species and locations that involve shallow dives. There are a couple of reasons you should stay shallow early on. First, lighting, with so many different composition options and settings, etc., staying shallow takes a lot of the effort out of getting your lighting right.
Secondly, and more importantly, staying shallow reduces the task loading on the scuba element of your dive. You can stay longer without narcosis issues or gas usage problems. You can focus on mastering shark images and developing your skills.
Develop A Shark Shooting Process
Taking pictures of sharks is varied, and you can shoot multiple types of shark images. Think of close-up portraits, side-on shots, pans across the body, silhouettes, schools, and even ground encounters with bottom-dwelling species.
The main issue with these types is that they require different settings and lighting options. For instance, your strobes will be positioned differently if you are shooting a close-up of a zebra shark on the bottom, in contrast to shooting a silhouette of a hammerhead above you.
Cycling between all these settings is time-consuming and wastes precious time that you are better off using to take actual pictures. Trying to take all these types of images on one dive is difficult. Focus on one or two types per dive, where you can easily switch between settings. For instance, a silhouette and side pan of the body could have similar settings and a wide-angle lens, while a head-on portrait may not need the lens; repeatedly attaching and removing your lens is a waste. So avoid portraits on that dive.
Keep your process simple and methodical, and move between image types that require the least gear changes. This way, you can learn to optimize your gear by image type and spend more time shooting images than adjusting settings.
Know Where to Aim
While it may seem very obvious, knowing where to point your camera when taking shark images is crucial to producing high-quality pictures. As a general rule, you have two main options for shooting shark images.
Aim for the Head
Aiming for the head is always a good idea; however, in this case, it depends on your position in the water relative to the oncoming shark. If you are slightly side-on to the shark, you need to follow a slightly different rule to shoot a great shark image – more about that below. Here we are talking about positioning yourself directly in the path of the shark so that if it continues, it will swim directly through your camera lens.
Being in the position, you can produce some stunning shark portraits, where the only items visible will be the animal's mouth, snout, possibly eyes depending on the type of shark, pectoral fins, and lots of teeth in a smile if you are lucky.
Bing at the same level and shooting the shark head produces some of the most stunning shark images around. Interestingly this technique works best with bigger sharks like tigers and great white, as well as those who are relatively harmless but have an impressive array of teeth on display, like sand tigers or lemon sharks.
Aim for the Fin
The second position and technique when it comes to shooting shark images is when you are side-on to the animal. While one of the principles of photography is to try and shoot the face, doing so in this scenario is not always the best option.
Aiming your camera at the face as the point of focus will often produce an image where the head is in focus, and the image becomes blurry as you cast your eyes down the rest of the body. In many situations, these images result in the tail being chopped out of the shark image.
If you are in this side-on position to a shark, your best option is to focus and point your camera on the tip of the pectoral fin nearest you. Doing so means you can get far more of the shark's body in focus and bring the head and mouth (where the action is) closer to the image foreground.
A bonus of aiming at the tip of the pectoral fin is that it will often produce a great rule of thirds photo. You will generally find the shark's eye will end up being at a rule of thirds intersection line if you aim at the pectoral fin and place it in the middle of the image!
Treat The Viewfinder as Your Eye
If you take images of nudibranchs or sea slugs, you can swim around, find your target, figure out your best angles, and finally snap away. That is because when you are shooting slow-moving creatures, you have the luxury of time.
Sadly, you do not have the same luxury when it comes to shooting sharks. Encounters are often fleeting, and you don’t have the time to set up your shots and take do-overs if you are unhappy with your first effort.
When diving with sharks, treat the viewfinder as your eye and always be ready for the moment when the perfect picture will come into frame. Obviously, you won’t do the whole dive with your camera in front of your face. Instead, have your hands in front of you with your camera ready. As soon as you see a potential subject in the distance, bring your camera up and start to track your target in the viewfinder.
This gives you many more opportunities to snap the perfect image when all the elements like lighting, relative position, body shape, and angle are just so for a second or two. You will find that your subject is already in the frame, and all you need to do is hit your camera button to capture a perfect shark image.
Break Some Rules
The old saying goes “rules are made to be broken,” and that can be the case when it comes to shark images—especially shark portraits. Traditional compositional techniques and rules of thirds call for you to place the focus point of your image off to one side or at the intersection of the third lines.
However, sometimes if you are trying to capture the essence of a shark, you need to put them perfectly in the middle of the frame. Positioning the tip of the snout of your subject perfectly in the middle of your image may not be conventional, but it can produce stunning results.
If you can call it that, the shark and its face become the focus point of the whole image. This can have an even more dramatic effect and take your shark image to the next level if the image is a close-up or cropped, so the animal's face occupies most of the picture.
