We love our sardines. They live right in front of our dive shop, at our house reef. The top of the school is sometimes just below the water surface, and the bottom of the massive fish aggregation is never deeper than 10 meters. Sometimes, the fish venture over the reef edge onto the shallow reef top, on other times they stay out in the blue open water.
Me and some science minded guests have recently been discussing how many individual sardines are there in this school. We arrived at estimates between half a million and two millions – a lot of fish!
This is how you can photograph the sardines:
– Pick a sunny day. If it’s overcast, photograph something else. Use your macro lens then.
– I am using the Canon f4, 17-50 mm L-lens, mostly at the 17 mm end (on a full-frame camera) for the sardines. The majority of the light for the shots will come from the sun (hence a sunny day is better). I nevertheless also use two strobes, to regain some of the color temperature lost underwater. That’s especially important if there is something else but the sardines in the shot. If that doesn’t work for some reason, make the image black & white after the dive on your laptop. Better b & w than weak colors!
– I you are using a point & shoot camera, simply zoom out as much as you can for sardine photography.
– Take a lot of shots. Sometimes they will dart by right your camera. You need to have patience to get these moments when the school looks particularly interesting.
– Bring a diver as a model, to give the viewer of your photographs a sense of scale. A piece of reef in the shot also conveys scale. However, an underwater model beats a reefscape any day. In general it is true that:
shot with many sardines = good photograph
shot with many sardines and a pretty lady diver = very good photograph
In case you are wondering, I am as insightful and funny in person as in my blog posts. I am now offering 2-day intensive photo workshops at Savedra. Check out the program here!
