On Thursday evening, I had a bit of an adventure. One of the delegates on my upcoming Shooting Day course specialises in underwater photography, so I asked if I could come to her to try it out. We were using a David Lloyds pool, where she normally shoots babies and children underwater. I turned up with my model and friend, Susan, as well as my stylist, Kate, who tried valiantly to salvage the dress we had used at our fountain shoot at Somerset House (see last month’s issue of Photo Pro magazine. It was on the cover).  I stopped at Boots on the way to pick up a small selection of waterproof make-up; it’s surprisingly easy to spend £50 on crap!

Depressingly, it took two people to help hoist me into my 10-year-old wetsuit. Time to lay off the…well, everything, really! Nicola showed me how to put the camera in the casing. She has a Nikon and a plastic underwater housing unit for it that she bought secondhand (£3000 on ebay. Gulp). All the buttons on the outside of the housing correspond to the buttons on the back of the camera, so that you can still control aperture, exposure, and look at the images to see if you’re getting the shots. We then put up a white vinyl background down the side of the pool and weighted it down. All that was left was to climb into the water.

Susan was a very good sport and a fabulous model. Nicola said that a lot of people can’t emote underwater, but Susan handled it really well. Poor thing, by the end of the session, her eyes were all red from opening them in the water. There was no deep end, so the space we had to work in was pretty shallow, which meant we couldn’t do any big body movements. But it was perfect for my first time.

Here are a few examples from my very first attempt at underwater photography. It was loads of fun, but it would take a massive amount of investment into equipment to do it all the time. I did enjoy it loads and I’m glad that I’ve tried it now. Enjoy!

And finally, me and Susan at the end of the shoot!

If only I had a bigger pool, I could do these.