Depth is one of the most overlooked ingredients in underwater photography. I hear almost nobody speaking about it, and you see almost no written articles about it. Even when people are discussing images, they don’t discuss the depth in the photo, but what do I actually mean when I say “depth”?

Here is the pattern I see constantly, in my own early work as much as in workshops I run for other divers. A subject is found, usually something colorful and cooperative, and it gets lit evenly and squarely from the front. The strobes are dialed in so the foreground glows, the exposure looks technically correct on the back of the camera, and everyone is happy. Except the background behind that subject is either pure black or a featureless wall of blue, and there is nothing in the frame to tell the eye how far away anything is or give any sense of scale. The result looks like a cutout pasted onto a color swatch rather than a photograph taken inside a three-dimensional world. It is properly exposed and completely flat.

Creating depth in your image means having a photo that draws you through the scene, from the front of the image just in front of the lens all the way into the background. It makes the viewer look across the scene and constantly get drawn through it as the image is layered, often with foregrounds, mid sections and backgrounds. There are many ways to do this, though, and below are the techniques I often use both in wide angle and macro. Many of these tricks I could write a whole article on, but this is a short summary of a variety of techniques to get you thinking about depth next time you go shooting.

Wide angle is where flatness shows up fastest, because the field of view is wide enough that a blank background becomes impossible to ignore. The fix starts before you even raise the camera: choose your position relative to the subject and the sun so that something recognizable sits behind your main point of interest, even if that something is rendered as pure black shape rather than full color.

Silhouettes are the simplest version of this. Drop slightly below a coral head, a bommie, a gorgonian fan, or even a swim-through, and shoot up and across so the structure is outlined against a darker, silhouetted reef behind it. Add an additional third layer of blue water behind the reef scene, and all of a sudden you have a three-layered image from front to back. Add in a sunburst and you’re now into a four-layered image.

You expose for that background water, often a stop or two under what your camera's meter suggests, which drives the reef into a rich black shape rather than a lit, detailed mess. Your strobes then light only the true foreground subject, a turtle gliding past or a diver hovering at the edge of the frame. What you get is instant separation: a lit, colored foreground object sitting in front of a black silhouette and then into a graduated blue background. It is these planes that your eye reads as depth.

The trick most people miss is angle. Shooting flat and horizontal into a reef gives you one plane of coral at one distance, which reads as a wall, not a landscape. Get low, angle the lens upward even slightly, and you introduce a horizon and a sense of near versus far along that reef line. I try to always have a far element, whether that is a smudge of a bommie in the distance, a wall of fish, or simply the sun's ball breaking through the surface, visible past my main subject. That distant element does not need to be sharp or even identifiable. It only needs to exist, because its presence tells the eye there is space between it and everything closer to the lens.

Large subjects like sharks and wrecks are where composition does most of the work, because you cannot light the whole animal or the whole hull evenly and you should not try. What you can do is use the natural lines those subjects offer to pull the eye through the frame from front to back, which is one of the strongest depth cues available to a photographer working with nothing but geometry.

With sharks, this usually means shooting from slightly below and slightly ahead of the animal, angled so the body runs diagonally across the frame rather than parallel to it. A shark photographed side-on, perfectly broadside, tends to look like a cardboard cutout because every part of the animal is roughly the same distance from the lens. Turn that same shark even fifteen degrees so the nose is closer to the dome and the tail recedes into the blue, and you have created a line that runs from near to far. Add a slight upward angle so the pectoral fins and the water above create layers of blue tone getting lighter toward the surface, and the sense of scale and distance becomes obvious without a single edit in post.

Here are two shark shots, years apart, showing the difference with angles, lighting, and technique to create depth.

Wrecks reward exactly the same thinking, just at a larger scale. A hull shot straight-on from the side is a flat wall of steel. Move to a corner, a bow or a stern, and shoot along the length of the ship so the railings, hull plates or mast lines converge toward a vanishing point in the murk. Those converging lines are leading lines in the truest sense — they physically lead the viewer's eye from the close, detailed foreground back into the softening, darkening distance where the wreck disappears into particulate and blue. I will often position a diver at that vanishing point, small in the frame, both for scale and to give the eye somewhere to land once it has traveled the length of the line.

Angle also controls how much water column you are shooting through, which matters because water is your depth cue generator. Shoot along a wreck rather than across it and you are looking through far more meters of water at the stern than at the bow closest to you, which naturally graduates the color and contrast from crisp and warm up close to soft and blue further away. That graduation is depth, rendered automatically by physics, and it is far more convincing than anything added afterward.

Wreck photography lives or dies on the relationship between your strobe light and the ambient light behind it, and this is where a lot of divers sell their images short by lighting the foreground correctly and letting the background go to solid black through underexposure.

The technique I rely on is exposing the ambient background deliberately, independent of the strobes, before I even think about foreground light. I set my shutter speed and aperture so that the water itself, without any strobe contribution, renders as a rich, saturated blue rather than black. This usually means a slower shutter than you would use on a sunny reef, sometimes down to as low as 1 second when shooting deep inside wrecks.

Once that background exposure is locked in through test shots, the strobes come in purely to light the specific foreground element — a porthole, a piece of superstructure, a diver at a hatch — without touching the background at all because they simply do not reach that far. This way you end up with layers again: a lit foreground, a black middle section where neither ambient nor strobe light reaches, and then a blue background of ambient light coming in from a porthole, a window, or another opening.

The result is a frame with genuine depth built from light itself. This is also where careful use of a slow shutter earns its keep, because a longer exposure lets more of that ambient blue light accumulate on the sensor, deepening the background without needing to push your ISO into noisy territory.

You can then add even more depth to your image: a model, then a torch, then an off-camera light. Creating these layers of interest is what makes your images stand out from the crowd.

Macro subjects present the opposite problem to wide angle. Instead of an entire ocean threatening to look empty, you often have a busy, cluttered reef immediately behind your subject, all of it close enough to be in focus and fighting for attention. Depth in macro comes from doing the reverse of the wide angle approach: rather than adding recognizable background elements, you deliberately remove their detail.

A wide aperture, often somewhere around f5.6 or even wider depending on your lens and how much working distance you have, throws that cluttered background into soft, creamy blur while keeping your subject's eye and key features tack sharp. The distance between subject and background matters as much as the aperture itself. Even a modest gap of ten or fifteen centimeters (about 4 to 6 inches) between your nudibranch or shrimp and whatever is behind it is often enough to turn a distracting tangle of rubble into a smooth wash of color, because that background blur increases rapidly with distance once you are shooting close up.

A few soft, out-of-focus points of light or color behind a macro subject read as atmosphere and depth rather than clutter, in the same way bokeh works in terrestrial portrait photography. What kills depth in macro is a background that is both close and sharp, because it competes directly with your subject for the viewer's attention and collapses the sense of any space between the two.

Before every macro shot, I often look for backgrounds first. These can be colorful corals or anything unusual on the reef. The backgrounds can also be introduced into the scene by yourself. Almost anything can be used to make a background, and you can take this as far as you like.

Here are two examples of the same species shot in two different ways.

One of the most underused depth techniques in underwater photography is refusing to light the whole frame evenly. Even, flat lighting across an entire composition is one of the fastest ways to flatten a three-dimensional scene into a two-dimensional picture, because even light removes the shadow and falloff information that our brains use constantly to judge distance and shape on land and underwater alike.

Instead, I aim strobes so that light falls off deliberately across the frame, brightest on the primary subject and fading into shadow toward the edges and toward the background. Narrowing a strobe's beam, angling it inward rather than straight ahead, or physically pulling one strobe back and down so it grazes a subject at an angle rather than blasting it head-on, all create shadow and highlight variation that the eye reads as form and distance.

Off-camera lighting can also add a real sense of depth to your images. Adding light into parts of the frame that are not close to your lens can really help make your image pop and cause the viewer to look through the frame much more. Lighting key parts of the background can be fantastic for this. Also, if you are using any models, having them hold a light source can be great for adding this additional depth.

A handful of other habits round out everything above and are worth training yourself to notice on every dive. Layering is one of the simplest: actively composing so that a frame contains a clear foreground element, a midground subject and a background shape, even if that background is only suggested through tone rather than detail. Three layers, three distances, is almost a formula for depth.

Scale cues matter just as much as lighting or composition. A lone diver included at the edge of a wreck or reef scene, even small and partly silhouetted, gives every other element in the frame something to be measured against, instantly communicating size and distance in a way no amount of clever lighting can replicate on its own.

Negative space, meaning open, empty blue water left deliberately in a frame rather than filled with subject, does real work too. A subject placed off-center with a large area of graduated blue beside it lets that color gradient itself communicate distance, since blue water reliably shifts in tone and saturation the further it sits from the lens.

Shooting toward the surface and including the sun, sunbursts or simply the brighter band of surface light at the top of a frame, gives an automatic sense of up versus down and near versus far that flat, horizontal reef shots rarely offer. And color itself is a tool: preserving a warm, strobe-lit foreground against a background that is a deep blue, with warm sunbeams at the top of the frame, again makes your image come to life.

It also helps to review your images away from the dive, back on a proper screen rather than the small display on the back of your housing. Flatness is often invisible in the moment, when the excitement of a good subject in front of the lens crowds out everything else in the viewfinder, and only becomes obvious later when you can compare a series of shots side by side. Get into the habit of asking one question of every frame you keep: could I tell how far apart the elements in this photograph actually were? If the honest answer is no, that is your cue to go back and work the scene again with backgrounds, angles and light in mind rather than subject alone.

None of these techniques are complicated once you know to look for them, but they all demand the same shift in thinking: stop treating the space behind your subject as empty water to be avoided, and start treating it as the third dimension of your photograph. Depth is not something you add afterward. It is something you notice, and choose, before you ever press the shutter.