How Topside Photography Makes You a Better Underwater Photographer

Think about how much actual camera time a typical diving holiday really gives you. Three dives a day is a generous schedule for most trips, and each of those dives runs about an hour. That sounds like three hours of shooting, but it never really is. Strip out the descent, the safety stop, the minutes spent settling your buoyancy or following a guide toward a wreck you have not seen before, and the camera in your hand is doing real work for only a fraction of that hour. Across a full week away, you might log fifteen or twenty dives. The honest number of minutes you spend actually composing a frame, checking exposure, and firing the shutter is smaller than most of us like to admit.

Now compare that to an afternoon on land. A photographer walking a beach at low tide, or sitting at the edge of a pond with a long lens, can rack up hundreds of frames before lunch. There is no tank to watch, no depth to manage, no time limit set by how much air remains. That imbalance is exactly why the strongest underwater photographers I know are shooting constantly when they are not diving, and why that habit is not a distraction from their underwater work. It is preparation for it.

I did not always believe this. For years I treated topside photography as something to pass the time between dive trips, a lesser cousin to the real work happening below the surface. It took a long time on land, camera in hand, to realize that many of the things that come second nature to me underwater were first mastered in the open air.

There is also the matter of what actually fills a dive trip. A morning briefing, a boat ride to the site, a gear check, a buddy check, and only then does the actual dive begin. Add up the surface intervals, the tank changes, and the meals in between, and a full day on a liveaboard might leave you with three real hours of shooting spread across three separate dives, each one interrupted by its own small situations. A single quiet afternoon with a camera and no depth gauge to watch will often out produce that entire day, simply because nothing is competing for your attention.

Underwater, you are almost always task loaded. You are watching your buoyancy, tracking your air, keeping an eye on your buddy, and trying to stay close enough to a subject without crashing into the reef to get there. Gloves and drysuits in cold water make small dials harder to feel. A fogged mask makes a tiny screen harder to read. None of that leaves much spare attention for fumbling through menus to find the one setting you need before the moment passes.

Topside shooting strips away almost all of that task loading. Your hands are free, your vision is clear, and your mind is clear — you're in your natural comfort zone.

It is the menu system of your camera that you truly master topside — the buttons change position once the camera is in your housing, but the layout of the menu system does not change. When shooting topside you play around with the menus much more, because it is easier, and you learn them inside out. That helps you no end when you shoot underwater: it takes me split seconds to change things like focus type, front and rear curtain sync, or to turn settings effects on and off. All of this I mastered on land, and it pays me back so often when I'm underwater.

There has never been a better time to learn your camera than when switching from DSLR to mirrorless. Modern mirrorless cameras are so tech-heavy compared to DSLRs that the menus are far more complicated. When I moved from a Canon DSLR to a Sony mirrorless, the menu system seemed incredibly difficult — so complex and vast in comparison. But mastering it on land made the underwater transition so much easier for me.

When you make the move to mirrorless, you're doing so because you believe the new technology will make you a better shooter and improve your photography. I can assure you it most certainly will not, unless you get to grips with the tech and the menus. If anything, you will find it even harder to shoot mirrorless than DSLR if you don't take the task of learning the menus seriously. You'll be paying for tech that you're not even using.

In almost every photo workshop I teach, the entire first day — and often the second — goes into ensuring cameras are set up properly, eliminating many of the tech issues people could have solved or understood before they even arrived, so it doesn't cost them valuable underwater time.

Ambient light behaves the same way whether it is falling across a garden or filtering down through eighteen meters (59 ft) of water. The physics of exposure do not change. What changes underwater is how little time you get to work it out, and how hard it is to review a shot properly with a bulky housing and a small screen in front of your mask.

On land, you can retake every frame, check the histogram, adjust one stop, and fire again on the exact same subject in the exact same light. That kind of rapid feedback loop is how real understanding of exposure gets built, and it happens far faster on a walk through a park than it ever will on a single dive. Shoot enough different topside conditions — harsh midday sun, soft light at dusk, flat grey cloud cover — and you start reading light on sight rather than guessing at it. That instinct travels with you underwater. When you drop onto a reef and the ambient light is thinner than you expected, or a shaft of sun cuts through the water at an angle you have not seen before, you already have a mental library of what that kind of light usually needs. You are not starting from zero. You are pulling from hundreds of hours you already put in somewhere else.

Enhancing light is important too. Sometimes the light is very limited underwater, and learning to make the most of it can help you no end — shooting astrophotography and the Northern Lights can teach you so much about your camera's sensitivity and how to make the most of low-light conditions. Knowing how to incorporate foregrounds and key features into your own ambient-light images can help you no end when you find yourself shooting inside a wreck or cave.

Anyone who knows me will know that I am not a fan of birds, and even less so of photographing them — but I make an exception for species that can't fly too well, namely puffins and penguins. Shooting these birds taught me a lot about photographing animals in ambient light only: with no flash to freeze the subject, you instead rely on a fast shutter speed. I had not really thought about how fast it should be, but soon realized speeds into the thousands were required to keep things sharp. This then led me to learn shutter-priority methods — presetting my shutter speed and aperture for the sharpness and bokeh I wanted, then using auto ISO to dictate the exposure.

That experience rebuilt my sense of what fast actually means. Not long afterward, I found myself shooting in Magdalena Bay, Mexico — a shallow-water, ambient-light-only destination. The skills I'd learned around semi-auto exposures and fast shutter speeds let me adapt instantly to the conditions and get the shot every time, in a location where the action is incredibly fast-paced and you only get one chance.

Macro work on land taught me things about lighting that took me years to properly translate underwater, mostly because I did not go looking for frogs expecting a photography lesson. In the rainforest around La Fortuna in Costa Rica, shooting tiny tree frogs at night, I ran into the exact same problem underwater macro shooters fight constantly: a small, wet, reflective subject that blows out the instant you point a single light straight at it.

What worked on the frogs — diffusing the light, angling it, backlighting the animals for different effects — were all the same principles underwater photographers need to use. I just learned the logic of it on a rock beside a stream rather than in open water.

I also spent a lot of that trip lighting translucent subjects, webbed feet, thin tadpole tails, backlighting them just enough to see the shape and texture glow through rather than flattening into a wet highlight.

One red-eyed tree frog in particular taught me more about lighting a small, reflective subject than I could have learned over hundreds of macro encounters underwater.

Some scenes are simply too big for one frame, and that problem is not unique to the ocean. I learned to shoot proper panoramas inside ice caves in Iceland, where the scale of the ice made a single wide shot feel small and flat no matter how wide the lens went. Shooting a panorama properly means overlapping frames by a consistent margin, keeping your exposure locked across the whole sequence, and moving in a steady, deliberate arc rather than swinging the camera around loosely. Get any of that wrong and the software cannot stitch the frames back together cleanly.

That discipline, shot after shot, taught me patience I did not have before, and it gave me a real process for something I had always avoided underwater: cavern systems and wreck interiors too large to fit in a single frame, even with a fisheye lens. Now, when I am hovering neutrally buoyant in front of a scene too big to capture in one shot, I fall back on exactly what the ice caves taught me. I move through the scene in a steady arc, keep my strobe power and exposure locked, and overlap each frame enough that the stitch has something solid to work with later. It is a slower way to shoot underwater, and it only works because I already practiced the discipline somewhere with unlimited air and no current pushing me off my line.

In the ice caves, I learned to keep roughly a third of each frame overlapping with the one before it, since anything less gave the stitching software too little to match and anything more meant standing there far longer than the light or my patience allowed. I learned to lock white balance manually rather than trust auto white balance to stay consistent across a dozen frames of blue ice under changing cloud cover outside. Both lessons sound small on their own, but together they are the entire difference between a panorama that stitches into one seamless wall of ice and one riddled with visible seams and mismatched color, and both translate directly onto a cavern wall or a wreck's hull with barely any adjustment at all.

The transfer of skills runs in both directions. Underwater photographers spend so much time with extreme wide lenses, fisheye especially, that we stop thinking of them as unusual. We reach for a fisheye because it lets us fit an entire wreck or a full-length shark into a frame from a distance a normal lens could never manage. That comfort with extreme distortion is not something most topside photographers ever build, because most topside subjects do not demand it.

Bring that same fisheye instinct onto land and you start seeing shots a typical landscape or street photographer would walk straight past. Getting the lens close enough to a subject that a normal shooter would call absurd, letting the edges of the frame bend and stretch on purpose, shooting from an angle so low that the horizon curves — all of that feels completely ordinary to someone who learned to shoot inside a coral head or beside a wreck's hull. I have taken some of my favorite topside frames purely because I approached a scene with underwater habits nobody warned me not to use. The rules that supposedly govern wide-angle photography on land were written by people who never had to fit a whole shipwreck into one shot from three feet (0.9 m) away.

When I was in Antarctica, everyone was shooting long lenses for the penguins — nice enough, but everyone came home with similar shots. The penguins, though, approach you: they often don't fear people and will waddle right up to you, so I shot them with the super-wide 14mm lens I had with me, the one I normally use for split-level underwater shooting. The result: a collection of penguin images unique to me that nobody else has, all thanks to my underwater knowledge.

Shooting on land also hands you something a dive trip almost never will: a genuinely large batch of photos to edit afterward. A single afternoon photographing birds or macro subjects can leave you with more frames than an entire week of diving, and that volume is what actually builds real editing skill. Working through hundreds of frames pushes you to try things you would never risk on a rare underwater keeper — testing an aggressive crop, a new noise-reduction setting, or a different approach to white balance — simply because plenty of other frames are sitting right behind it if the experiment fails.

Enough of those experiments work that you end up building a small toolkit of editing moves you would never have discovered by only ever working through the handful of keepers a single dive produces, and every one of those moves is ready to use the next time you sit down with a card full of reef images.

When shooting on land, you're also more likely to try new techniques such as HDR, panoramas, and focus stacking. All of these require advanced photo editing, and those skills will pay you back time and again with your underwater images.

None of these lessons are really separate from each other, and none of them stay neatly on one side of the surface. The muscle memory you build on land shows up the moment your hands need to move faster than your thoughts underwater. The exposure instincts you sharpen through hundreds of quick, low-stakes frames on a walk or in a garden are the same instincts that tell you what to do in a fast-paced setting underwater. Watching birds taught me shutter speed. Shooting frogs taught me how to place a light. Ice caves taught me patience and process for scenes too big for one frame. My own underwater habits, in turn, gave me a way of seeing that most topside shooters never develop on their own.

Treat your camera as one continuous practice rather than two separate hobbies split by a waterline. The next time you are stuck on land between dive trips, do not think of it as time away from the real work. Go shoot birds, frogs, landscapes — anything that puts a camera in your hand and gives you more than an hour a day to use it. Every frame you take up there is quietly training the photographer who shows up down here.