Capturing the Magic of Lembeh: A Photography Workshop Experience

I recently returned from Lembeh Strait in Indonesia—my sixth trip overall and third year in a row. For the past couple of years, I’ve attended a photography workshop with my newsletter partner-in-crime, Byron Conroy. As readers of this newsletter know, I’m a big advocate for underwater photography workshops as a way to improve skills, get inspired to learn new techniques, and walk away with some incredible images. This year was no exception, and I spent time on dives honing techniques I had barely used before.

Lembeh Strait, renowned for its muck diving, is a highly productive location for underwater photographers. Each dive presents an opportunity to capture truly stunning images, thanks to the diverse and often bizarre marine life that thrives in the area’s black sand slopes and rubble-strewn seabed.

The workshop took place at Dive Into Lembeh, a resort run by the wonderful Miranda and Steve Coverdale. I wrote a detailed review of the resort after last year’s trip, which you can read here. The workshop itself spanned nine nights, with eight days of diving. Some participants opted to extend their stay for a few extra days to maximize their time in this unique environment. We had an excellent dive-to-guide ratio of 2:1, ensuring that each pair of divers received plenty of personalized attention. The guides are incredibly skilled at spotting marine life, making each dive highly rewarding. Additionally, we had a maximum number of six guests per boat, providing plenty of space to maneuver and reducing the overall number of divers at a site, which greatly enhanced the experience.

Byron runs his workshops similarly to others but with a distinctive twist—he takes a highly structured approach. Rather than covering techniques randomly, he builds progressively, ensuring that by the end of the workshop, attendees are combining multiple skills seamlessly. Each evening, Byron delivers a lecture and conducts an image review, during which participants submit three images for group discussion. The next day’s dives are designed to reinforce the previous night’s lessons, allowing attendees to apply newly learned techniques in a practical setting.

Between dives, Byron is always available to answer questions and encourage photographers to experiment with different approaches. One of his key teaching points is that, in Lembeh, backgrounds are often unappealing due to the nature of muck diving. The challenge is to isolate the subject from the background effectively. There are multiple ways to achieve this, each offering a distinct visual style with its own advantages depending on the subject and conditions.

Byron begins with the fundamentals, such as shooting subjects against a black background, introducing techniques like inward lighting, beam restrictors, snoots, and precise aperture and shutter settings. He demonstrates each technique using his own camera setup, giving attendees a hands-on understanding of how to manipulate lighting and composition. As the workshop progresses, he introduces more advanced skills, including shallow depth of field, backlighting, colored and artificial backgrounds, natural background integration, creative lens use, slow shutter techniques, and, ultimately, motion blur with a snoot. The final two nights include sessions on advanced post-processing in Lightroom and Photoshop. Yours truly helped with one of those sessions.

The group of attendees ranged from highly experienced underwater photographers to relative newcomers, some of whom had never attempted macro photography before. Regardless of their starting point, the results at the end of the workshop were truly impressive, with every participant making significant strides in their photography.

The 2026 workshop is already sold out, but due to overwhelming demand, an additional week has been added, beginning April 18th for nine nights. The workshop will also be held in 2027, running for nine nights starting April 26th, with an optional 12-night extension. If you’re interested in attending, contact Miranda at [email protected].