Photos Forgive Mistakes. Video Doesn't
With a photo, you can fire off fifty frames of a whale rolling past and keep the one where its
eye is sharp, the light's right, and your buoyancy happened to hold for a quarter of a
second. Forty-nine mistakes, invisible. Nobody ever sees them.
Video doesn't work like that. There's no ten seconds you can throw away and no best frame to cherry-pick from the mess. The clip has to hold together the whole way through, your framing, your movement, your distance, all of it, for the full duration, in one go. One bad kick halfway through and the whole thing's unusable.
That's the actual reason people struggle with underwater video more than photos, even good photographers. It's not a gear problem. It's that video gives you zero room to hide.
So here's a few tips and tricks to capture better shots:
GEAR
Whatever you've got is enough to start. Phone in a housing, action cam, a proper rig eventually if
you stick with it. The tier doesn't make the story. What you do with it does.
A mirrorless rig in a housing. The gear tier doesn't make the story.
SETTINGS MATTER MORE HERE THAN ANYWHERE ELSE
With a photo, a wrong setting costs you one frame. With video, it costs you the whole clip, and by
the time you notice, the moment's gone. A few defaults that save you: 60fps that's your everyday setting, later in post you can export in 24-30fps for more natural feel. Save 100 to 120fps for a moment that actually earns it, a tail fluke, a fast pass, shark hunting fish or birds sweeping near, not everything "just in case." Shoot 4K even if you're delivering 1080p, it gives you room to crop and stabilise later. And unless you already know how to grade, skip log profiles. Flat footage looks washed out straight off the card, and log without a proper colour pass just means you either ship it looking wrong or lose hours fighting it. Standard colour is the right call until you've earned the
reason to change it.
WHITE BALANCE
Water eats colour fast, reds and oranges are gone within the first few metres, everything trends blue-green the deeper you go. With a photo you're correcting one file, and if the white balance is off you can usually save it in post without anyone noticing. Video doesn't give you that luxury. Wrong
white balance holds across the entire clip, every frame of it, and there's no cherry-picking your way out.
Set a manual white balance for the depth you're actually shooting at, don't leave it on auto and hope. A red filter could help though with professional cameras you always set WB within. A dive light when possible, brings the warmth back before you ever touch colour in post, which is a much
easier fight than trying to manufacture it afterwards.
Same encounter, straight off the card versus after a white balance and colour pass.
BUOYANCY IS YOUR TRIPOD UNDERWATER
And this is exactly where video punishes you and photos let you off easy. A photo just needs one still instant of good trim. Video needs you holding it for the whole shot, and every bit of drift or overcorrecting kick shows up on screen the entire time. Hover, don't hold. Fighting to stay still costs more movement than trusting your trim. This one took me years to actually feel, not just know. If you are on the surface and it's rough either shoot in higher frame rate, crop and slow down footage in post or use the the movement for your advantage to relay a situation / artistic reasons, same as sometimes hand held shaky shots feel better then stable shots, it all comes down to story telling.
Controlled, still, deliberate. That stillness is what holds a shot together.
FRAME IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT
The rule of thirds works underwater, don't just centre everything by default. Use the surface, a reef edge, or a shaft of light as a natural line to frame against. Use structures/ animals/ people/ objects to create depth of field, try shooting low on some occasions. Frame from eye level with whatever you're filming, or slightly below, not from above. A downward angle flattens everything against a dark, cluttered seafloor. Shooting upward turns the surface into a backdrop, silhouettes, sunbursts, scale. It's one of the fastest ways to make ordinary footage feel like something.
Shot from below. The surface light does the framing for you.
MOVE SLOWLY AND LET THE ANIMAL SET THE DISTANCE
This isn't just etiquette, though it is that too. The best encounters happen when you stay still and something chooses to come closer. Chase it and you'll get shaky footage, and unlike a photo, you can't just wait for the next pass and try again mid-clip.
Stay still long enough and the encounter comes to you.
SHOOT IN THREES: WIDE, MEDIUM, DETAIL
This is the one habit that actually gives you something to edit later instead of one long,
unstructured clip. Wide for place and context, where are we. Medium for the actual action, thesubject and what it's doing. Detail for the moment that makes it feel personal, an eye, a fluke, a hand reaching out. A photo is one decision. Video needs you to have already made a few ideas before you even start swimming.
Wide, medium, detail. Three decisions made before you even start swimming.
AND UNDERWATER SOUND IS BASICALLY UNUSABLE
Bubbles, regulator noise, water pressure on the mic. This is the one spot where photo instincts don't apply at all, because there's no equivalent problem in stills. The real work happens after, topside voiceover, layered ambient sound, music. You're building the audio world in the edit, on purpose. That's the mindset, so imagine what sounds would come on top of the footage to also help you plan for the mood and feel you would like to pass onto the audience. Platforms like Artlist are a good place to find music and sound design without dealing with copyright headaches. Sound design happens on land, headphones on, long after the dive.
NOW THE PART I ACTUALLY SPEND THE MOST TIME ON
And almost nobody asks about. A photo can stand alone as one moment. Video can't, not really. Every clip needs something the viewer is following, an animal, a place, you as the guide. Without that it's just footage. Once you've got a subject, give it a shape. A hook that grabs attention in the first few seconds. A build, the encounter unfolding, the tension or anticipation. A payoff, the moment that pays off the setup, the reveal, the close encounter, the resolution. Something I am constantly working on to improve.
Think in scenes, not shots. A scene is a small idea, arriving at the site, the encounter itself, the aftermath, built from several shots working together. Story gets built scene by scene, not clip by clip. Every shot should know which scene it belongs to before you even take it. And whatever you're actually trying to say, the conservation angle, the moment that mattered to you, has to bewoven into what you show and said, not tacked on as a caption at the end.
THINKING LIKE A DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Once you've got the story, the technique stops being a checklist and starts being a set of decisions, the same way a director of photography thinks. Every choice below is really the same question asked over and over: what does this do to how the viewer feels.
Shot choice isn't just coverage, wide, medium, detail exists to control what the viewer understands and feels moment to moment. Angle is the same decision as before, but now on purpose, a low upward hero angle makes something feel powerful and larger than life, an eye-level angle makes it feel like connection. Movement is a choice too, a slow push-in builds tension or intimacy, staying still and letting the subject move through frame respects the animal and feels completely different from the camera chasing it. Light works the same way in the edit as it did in the water, toward the sun for drama, with the light behind you for clarity. Pacing has no real photo equivalent at all, asingle image doesn't have a rhythm, but a sequence does, how long you hold a shot changes how it feels, fast cuts for energy, longer holds for awe, cut on action so the flow stays invisible. And sound, the music and voiceover choices, sets the emotional register the visuals alone can't reach.
A FEW MISTAKES I SEE CONSTANTLY
Mostly because they're invisible until you're watching the footage back. Shooting everything on auto white balance and hoping. Chasing the animal instead of letting it come to you. And cutting every clip at full length instead of trimming down to the moment that actually matters, I myself also make these mistakes, but you get better and better the more you practice.
EDITING
Is the easier part to sort out if the footage you go is right and well planed for, it is time consuming but also one of my favorite parts of the process, seeing it all come together. CapCut if you want the simplest start, DaVinci Resolve if you want real colour control for free, Premiere or Final Cut once you're serious. Any of them will do the job.
If you would like to put all these into practice with a bunch of likeminded people, message me for details!
I will be leading a trip to Timor with Dive and More. You can find all the details here.
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