ABSTRACT

I often think back to my early days in underwater photography, when the TC system was just a subconscious contemplation in my mind, swirling around between visions of winning all the best competitions and capturing on film underwater subjects that others had never even seen. How naive I was back then. I remember my first turtle in the Florida Keys in 1982. I sneaked up carefully with my Nikonos 111 at arm’s length, and realised I needed a vertical format. Without a second thought I turned my camera and tray anticlockwise, and my long Oceanic aluminium arm holding a heavy Oceanic 2003 flash gun connected with my knees. Clouds of sand and debris billowed out from the reef below. My flash somehow became detached from the arm and began to float upwards like a balloon on a coiled string. Needless to say, I never got the shot of the turtle – but I remembered the embarrassment for some time. One good thing did come out of this: it made me realise that it was too late to start thinking about flash angles when I was on top of a subject and about to press the shutter. That is all the TC system is – just a prompt to consider how you may prefer to light a certain subject:

mat, the flash will illuminate the subject from the side, how will this affect the result?