Tag Archives: Acadia Stand Up Paddle Boarding

Sometimes you have to dive right in for the shot

 

Sometimes you have to come prepared to properly cover an assignment. This past week was a good example of just that.

I was given the assignment to cover paddleboard yoga in Southwest Harbor. I’ve never shot paddleboarding yoga but knew that to get the most interesting shots I would have to be close to the action. To get close to the action, I would have to be in the water.

So I grabbed my wetsuit and my underwater bag for my 5D Mark III and headed to Echo Lake to try to make some interestingly beautiful photos.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been in the water covering something. The reason I bought my Ewa-Marine underwater bag in the first place was to get shots of my friends wakeboarding while I sat in a tube in front of them.

The underwater bag makes it pretty difficult to change camera settings, and lens settings, once the camera is in the bag. You have to have a generalized idea of what your exposure will be before throwing the camera in. In these situations, I like to use a larger depth of field to help make sure things are in focus.

Besides settings being difficult to change, it’s pretty hard to look through the viewfinder while your camera is halfway submerged in water. What I like to do is try to use Liveview to better compose my shot instead of nearly drowning.

I was surprised how easy it was to shoot video while in the water. I was worried it would distort the moving images too much, but to my surprise, they stayed sharp.

Whenever you can get closer to the action, do it. Most of the time it makes for better photos, because you get to work on layering and filling the frame more. Had I of stayed on land, I would have been very limited with what I could have shot (see the second photo in the gallery) and the tranquility of the sport might have been lost.