Going to School Underwater
The instructional photo course will usually last a week and is normally located at a land-based dive resort. The location can vary but is usually selected based on easily accessed dive sites, experienced dive operators, good food and accommodations, and timely E 6 film processing. The week normally starts off with a checkout dive to become reacquainted with your equipment. It is during this time that you will learn to test the limitations of your strobe and camera system. Many times a novice shooter will attempt to take shots beyond the capability of the camera system in use and then wonder why the shot didn't turn out. After these preliminaries are complete, a normal day-to-day tempo for the course will develop.
A typical day begins with breakfast at 7:00AM, then arrive dockside at 8:00AM to prepare for a 2 tank morning dive. Due to the relatively low ambient light conditions on the first dive, most of the shooters will set up for macro photography where the strobe is the primary source of light. The second dive is the shooter's choice and can be macro or wide-angle depending on ambient light conditions, the dive site, or the days lesson plan. Optimum ambient light conditions for wide-angle photography are between the hours of 10AM and 2PM when the sunrays are more vertical. During the week, you will have ample opportunity to work both individually and collectively on specific problem areas.
After the second morning dive, its back to the resort for lunch and to drop off the exposed film for E 6 processing. Students will normally shoot a roll of film on each dive and will have 3 rolls processed for evaluation each day. Shooting a whole role of film on a single dive may seem difficult to a novice photographer, but the learned skill of bracketing your shots will result in many more exposed frames for each set up. The processed film will be readied for viewing and evaluation during the evening classroom session, which can start as early as 5:30PM and lasts until 8:30PM. In the meantime, its back to the boat at 2:00PM for the 3rd dive of the day and then back to the dock by 4:30PM.
Each day, the student is asked to review the day's results and provide at least 10 slides for classroom evaluation and critique. Every slide is evaluated separately by the pro and the students alike. Critical
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