Weekly Diving Report – September 7th – 13th 2019

Just like any Monday, we are back with another review of Koh Tao’s current diving conditions. This week has been quite consistent in terms of water temperature (28°C), visibility (up to 10m), water movements (no currents) and general weather patterns (it has been a bit cloudy throughout the week, but generally calm).

With this in mind, it’s quite interesting to see how different these typical conditions look at our various dive sites:

Talking about changes and different views/angles of the same subjects: This week we had a guest photographer, Ian, who was joining for an afternoon of diving and fine tuning his photography skills. It just so happens that Ian had previously given us a few of his underwater shots, and we thought it was time to compare his photographs and see what a bit of practice can do with your pictures…

Take this gorgeous, blue Christmas tree worm for example. Not a bad shot, that Ian got just a few weeks ago, right?

Now look at this stunning image that he captured last week at Twins, one of our very popular local dive sites. It goes to show what a difference a nice (solid) background and a good composition of your image can make:

Quite often we have our students ask us if they are allowed to take their (action) camera with them during a dive and the short answer is: As long as it’s a training dive, no, you are not allowed to bring a camera, because you are supposed to concentrate on your training and picking up new skills.

There are obviously exceptions to each rule and so you could for example bring along an underwater camera on the Adventure Dive ‘Digital Underwater Imaging’ which can be scheduled as part of your PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course.

Now let’s look at the next before-and-after comparison. This little cutie was in front of Ian’s lens during one of his dives in late July:

And this is what the same subject looks like on a picture that he shot last week! Quite a drastic difference, we find…

What we’re trying to say is, don’t get frustrated if your pictures don’t look right away like the shots we publish here on a weekly basis. Practice makes perfect and there’s a lot of skills you can pick up along the way. One of the most important skills in underwater photography (and videography of course) is being ‘stable’ in the water and what better course than the PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy Specialty to work on your trim!

Last but not least, we want to share this pretty little friend with you!

We hope you enjoyed this week’s report as much as we did and if you want to find out more about our bespoke options for photographers, simply send us a message!

See you next week!