You Don't Have to Love Every Photo: How Experimenting Makes You a Better Underwater Photographer

There are many images on my hard drive that I rarely show anyone. They are photographs I took on purpose, but I didn't like them when I shot them, and I still don't particularly like them today. There are black-and-white shots of reef scenes that never quite came together, macro subjects lit against strange colored backgrounds, blurry experiments with slow shutter speeds, and a whole collection of heavily stylized edits that look nothing like the rest of my work. If you scrolled through them, you might wonder what on earth I was thinking. The truth is, these images have taught me more about underwater photography than almost anything else I have ever shot.

When I run workshops, I see the same pattern again and again. Photographers arrive with a style they love, and they spend every dive chasing it. They are in their comfort zone; they have found something that works, and they stick to it religiously. There is nothing wrong with that. Knowing what you love is a huge part of developing as a photographer. But if you only ever shoot the thing you love, you only ever learn the lessons that one style has to teach you, and sooner or later you will stop improving, and you will also stop liking your own images.

This article is about giving yourself permission to shoot things you don't feel passionate about. To try styles you may never use in a portfolio. To edit a single image five different ways, knowing most of them will end up in the bin. Not because the results will be amazing, but because every one of those experiments will teach you something about light, and light is the one thing that connects every style of photography you will ever attempt.

Underwater photography is really a study of light in a hostile environment. Water absorbs color, scatters light, reduces contrast, and steals sharpness with every meter you shoot through. Whether you are photographing a manta ray in open water or a tiny shrimp on a sea pen, you are wrestling with exactly the same physics. The distance between your strobe and the subject, the angle at which the light hits it, the way the ambient light behaves at depth, and how quickly your light falls off into the background are all part of every single frame.

The problem is that when we shoot the same style every time, we stop noticing these things. We find a setup that works, we lock in our strobe positions and our settings, and we stop asking why it works. That is comfortable, and comfortable is where growth goes to die.

Trying a new style breaks that habit. It forces you to look at the scene differently, and in doing so, it pulls back the curtain on how light is actually behaving. It makes you think about how you can manipulate the light to get the effect you are looking for, and to find new ways to harness it. You might hate the photos. That is fine. What you take away is an understanding you can bring straight back to the style you love.

If there is one style I recommend every underwater photographer try, it is black and white. Plenty of divers dismiss it straight away. We go to enormous lengths to bring color back into our images, carrying strobes halfway around the world to put the reds and oranges back into a reef, so why would we throw it all away?

The answer is that color is a wonderful distraction. A bright orange sponge or a vivid soft coral can carry an image that is otherwise badly composed and poorly lit. Remove the color and there is nowhere to hide. All you are left with is tone, contrast, shape, and the direction of light. Suddenly you can see exactly where your strobes are hitting, where the shadows fall, and whether the subject actually separates from the background.

When I started shooting deliberately for black and white, I noticed very quickly that my strobe positioning was lazier than I thought. I had been lighting subjects flat and evenly from the front, and in color it had looked acceptable. In monochrome it looked lifeless. Moving the strobes further out to the sides and angling them slightly away from the subject created shadows that gave the scene shape. That lesson went straight back into my color work; it taught me to add texture and tone to my color images.

Black and white also teaches you to read ambient light. Sun rays cutting through the water column, the soft gradient from the surface down into the blue, and the silhouette of a diver against a bright surface all become the main event in monochrome. Here in Iceland, diving in Silfra, the visibility is extraordinary but the color palette is limited, and black and white suits the lava rock, the shafts of light, and the sheer scale of the fissure beautifully. Shooting there in monochrome taught me to think about the whole frame as a map of bright and dark areas rather than a collection of subjects. It also taught me about introducing additional off-camera lighting to enhance monochromatic images, and some of those images even went on to become competition winners.

If you want to try it, don't just convert your normal images afterward. Go on a dive with the intention of shooting black and white. If you have a mirrorless camera, set it to a monochrome picture profile so the rear screen shows you the image in black and white while you still record full-color raw files. Look for strong shapes, textures, contrast, and interesting light. Pay attention to where the brightest part of the frame is, because in black and white the eye goes straight to it. You may come back with nothing you love, but you will come back seeing light in a way you didn't before you went in. Enjoy playing with shutter speeds and apertures that you wouldn't normally use. See how you can overblow the highlights to create bright white parts of the image that look great in black and white, and see how far you can boost the shadows when shooting for deep blacks.

Another style that divides opinion is the use of artificial backgrounds in macro photography. This can mean holding a colored card, a printed pattern, or a small diffuser panel behind a subject to create a clean, controlled background instead of whatever the reef happens to be offering. Some photographers love the look. Others think it feels too much like studio work and not enough like nature photography. I sit somewhere in between, and I rarely use these shots in my portfolio, but I have learned an enormous amount from trying them, and some of my better-known photos have come from using exactly these techniques.

First, a word on doing this responsibly. The subject always comes first. If placing a background means touching the reef, disturbing the animal, or kicking up sediment, don't do it. Good buoyancy is essential, and many subjects simply aren't suitable. Work with animals that sit in open, sandy areas or on isolated perches where you can position a background without contact, and keep your time with each subject short. Some dive sites and competitions have specific rules about this too, so check before you start.

With that said, what fake backgrounds teach you is separation. When you put a colored card a few centimeters (an inch or two) behind a subject, you quickly discover how much of your strobe light is spilling past the animal and onto whatever is behind it. Move the card closer and it lights up brightly. Move it further away and it drops into darkness. This is the inverse square law in action, and seeing it play out right in front of you, with a background you control, makes it click in a way that no diagram ever could.

You will also start to understand how strobe angle affects the background independently of the subject. Angle your strobes slightly forward so the light feathers across the front of the subject, and the background falls away. Angle them back toward the card and it lights up. Change the power on one side only and you can create a gradient behind the subject. All of these are things you can do on a natural reef too, but with a fake background they become obvious and measurable.

You will also start adding separate light sources for the foreground and background so you can light two parts of the image independently, and that will teach you so much about light. You will also learn to block out ambient light and turn your little scene into a full-on underwater studio.

Black and white and fake backgrounds are two of my favorite teaching tools, but there are plenty of other styles worth a dive or two, even if they don't excite you.

Snoots are a great example. Restricting your strobe to a small, focused beam forces you to think about exactly where the light lands. You will miss far more shots than you hit at first, but you will come away understanding how narrow and directional light can be, which helps with everything from macro to lighting details inside a wreck.

Slow shutter speed work, where you drag the shutter and move the camera during the exposure, teaches you the relationship between ambient light and strobe light. The strobe freezes the subject while the ambient exposure records the movement. Understanding that balance is exactly the same skill you need to burn in a deep blue background behind a wide-angle reef scene or to light the inside of a cargo hold while keeping the blue in the doorway.

You have spent $25,000 on the latest camera and $6,000 on your dream two-week trip to Lembeh, and taken two weeks off work. This hobby is expensive, but the cheapest thing you can do is press the shutter. Take as many images as you possibly can, really go for it, and try new things on every dive. Dedicate time on each dive, in those quiet moments, to trying new things and enjoying the learning process. Nobody ever needs to see the bad images or the failures, but each one will teach you far more than taking the same shots time and time again.

Some photographers put a lot of thought into experimenting underwater, but when it comes to editing, they settle into a routine. They open the image, apply their usual adjustments, perhaps a preset they built years ago, tidy up the backscatter, and export. There is nothing wrong with having a workflow, but if every image receives the same treatment, you are missing one of the best learning opportunities in photography.

Something I push myself to do is take one image and edit it multiple times, with a different goal for each version. Not small variations, but completely different intentions. It sounds like a waste of time, and many of those edits will never be seen by anyone, but the process teaches you a remarkable amount about your files and about the light you captured.

Here is an exercise I recommend. Pick a single image you like, ideally a wide-angle scene with a mix of strobe light and ambient light. Then create at least four virtual copies in Lightroom or whichever software you use, and give each one a clear purpose.

For the first version, aim for a natural, honest edit. Correct the white balance, recover the highlights, lift the shadows gently, and make it look as close as possible to how the scene felt in the water.

For the second version, go dark and moody. Pull the exposure down, deepen the blues, add a vignette, and let the strobe-lit subject glow out of the darkness. You will find out very quickly how much of the scene was actually lit by your strobes and how much was ambient light, because the parts your strobes didn't reach will fall away completely.

For the third version, convert to black and white and push the contrast. Use the color sliders in the black-and-white panel to lighten or darken individual tones and see how the structure of the image changes. This will show you where your light was strongest and whether your composition works without color holding it together. Or try turning the image into a high-key version.

For the fourth version, try something in Photoshop. Add a layer with a filter, learn to use masks, and try AI. As much as I do not want any of my images to be AI-generated, I want to understand it, I want to know what it is capable of, and I want to have opinions on it.

Once you have all four versions side by side, look at them carefully. Which one surprised you? Which one fell apart? Which parts of the image held up under every treatment, and which parts failed each time? That is where the learning happens.

Always remember to make these new edits on creative copies of the original raw file, so your favorite version always stays in place and none of your edits are destructive.

The real value of multiple edits isn't the edits themselves. It is what they tell you about the decisions you made underwater. Every failure in the edit points back to something you can change on your next dive.

Over time this changes the way you shoot. You start thinking about the edit while you are still in the water. You leave a little more negative space because you know you might want to crop for a different mood. You underexpose the background slightly to give yourself more room to shape it later. You take a second frame with the strobes turned down because you know a darker version might be stronger. That kind of forward thinking only comes from spending time at the computer trying to make your images do different things.

It is also worth going back to old files and editing them again. I regularly revisit images from Chuuk Lagoon or the Red Sea that I shot years ago, and with fresh eyes and better editing skills I often find a completely different photograph hidden in there. Sometimes the new version is better. Sometimes it is worse. Either way, I understand the file, and the moment I captured it, a little more than I did before.

One practical habit I would recommend to everyone is keeping your experiments in a collection within Lightroom. It is not a portfolio, and it is not a collection of rejects. It is a record of things you tried, with a note about what you were trying to achieve and what you learned.

When you go back through it months later, you will be surprised at how many of those experiments shaped the photographs you are proudest of: the black-and-white dive that taught you to use texture, the fake-background session that taught you about subject separation, the time you finally understood layers and masks in Photoshop.

It also takes the pressure off. When you know that every dive is either going to produce a photograph you love or a lesson you need, you stop feeling disappointed by the images that don't work. You start seeing them as part of the process rather than a waste of a dive.

The underwater photographers I admire most are not the ones who found a style and stuck to it rigidly. They are the ones who kept experimenting, kept failing, and kept learning long after they could have settled into a comfortable routine. Their signature look didn't come from repeating the same shot a thousand times. It came from understanding light so well that they could make it do whatever they wanted.

So on your next trip, set aside a dive or two for something you would never normally shoot. Try black and white. Hold a background behind a subject that is suitable for it. Put a snoot on and miss a hundred shots. Then when you get home, take your favorite image and edit it four completely different ways.

You don't have to love every photo you take. Most of them you won't. But if every one of those photographs teaches you something about light, you will find that the images you do love start to come more often, more easily, and with far more intention behind them. That is what learning looks like, and it is worth every frame you would rather not show anyone.