 One of the great improvements in photography during recent years is the improved quality and sharpness of zoom lenses, those lenses that have a user-adjustable field of view. When I first started my career more than three decades ago, zoom lenses were thought of as second-class citizens, and serious photographers either didn’t use them or they only used a zoom lens when no one else was looking. It didn’t usually matter because when we saw the images they weren’t usually very sharp.
Technology has greatly improved the quality of images produced with modern-day zoom lenses. That is great news for photographers, but underwater it is only great news if you use a zoom to help you compose an interesting frame and you still get as close to your subjects as possible. Getting close helps produce sharper images and richer colors because you are shooting through less water and, yes, that’s true even in clear, tropical seas.
Using a zoom lens to try to artificially make a subject appear as if it is closer to a lens is often a fatal flaw because the image quality deteriorates dramatically as your camera-to-subject distance increases. This is especially true when trying to photograph relatively large subjects such as sharks, sea lions, manatees, manta rays and turtles. Getting close to your subject is always better, and even closer is better yet.
The two shark images that accompany this piece illustrate my point. If you look at the image on the left side of the page you can see what happened when I used a zoom lens to make the shark fill my frame, when in fact the shark was too far away. I was able to fill the frame, but the image looks soft and the colors lack effect. In short, the image quality is poor.
Now, look at the image on the right.This Caribbean reef shark looks crisp, clean and saturated. The difference is I took the image on the left from a camera-to-shark distance of about 12 feet (3.7 m). I took the image on the right from a distance of about 4 feet (1.2 m) from the camera to the shark’s nose. Getting a few feet closer produced a dramatically improved result.
So, when using a zoom lens, be careful not to become lazy, or to rely on the lens as a panacea. Getting closer to your subject and shooting through as little water as possible produces sharper images and richer colors — in other words, better images. Always get as close as you safely can to your subjects.
|
