Take Nothing But Great Pictures

This is the second part in our two-part series on HAPPY TIDE POOLING! from guest contributor Minette Layne. We hope some of you can use these techniques next time you step onto the reefs. Enjoy!

Souvenirs are nice, but even if the beach you’re at allows collecting of animals or shells from the beach, it’s best to leave all that stuff there.

Even shells that seem empty usually have loads of animals living on or in them (sometimes they’re microscopic, but they’re always there) and the shells break down on the beach to provide shelter, food, and minerals to thousands of other critters. If you take a sea star home to dry it, you’re killing it…and that’s just mean (and stinky!).

(Wait…before we go any farther… if you’re going tide pooling with kids, remember to put the camera on a lanyard or a nice, thick ribbon that can go around their neck. I can’t tell you how many times my fellow tide poolers have dropped one – kersplunk! – in a tide pool.)

Here are 4 important tips to consider when taking tide pool pictures:

1.  Get close.

I’ve taken a lot of photographs at the beach. For the first couple of years, they were all terrible. It’s tempting to take a photograph that shows the whole tide pool or a large rock covered with animals. Those pictures *can* be cool, but most often they just look weird and boring when you check them out later:

Instead, find the animal that you want to take a picture of and get it in your viewfinder. Now move as close as you possibly can. Try to fill up the whole frame with that animal, if possible.

Here’s another example. You see a lot of these Mossy Chitons in Northern California tide pools. You could take a picture like this:

Or you could really get in close (or, if you have a really high-resolution image, you can crop it later) to fill up the frame. Which do you think looks more interesting?

2. Avoid glare.

Lots of times animals are swimming around in tide pools and they look great, but when you take the picture all you see is a bunch of reflection on the water.

To take a picture where you can really see what’s happening in the tide pool, you need to get rid of glare. To do that, you can position your body right over the pool so that your shadow blocks out the glare or you can try moving around in different positions until you’re in just the right spot where the glare doesn’t show. If you’re tide pooling with a friend, you can ask them to stand in a spot that casts a shadow on the tide pool before you take the picture. Or, you can just keep the shadows to illustrate your own presence at the tide pools:

John Albers-Mead, a Flickr friend, superhacks with a DIY paper light filter/glare-reducer. Here he is taking pictures of those same Mossy Chitons you saw just a second ago:

3. Put the animal in your little bowl.

Sometimes the animal is hiding in the tide pool so well that you can’t get a picture or the sun is so bright that you can’t block out the glare. In those situations, I put the animal gently into my little bowl to take the pictures.

I usually put a little piece of seaweed on the bottom of the bowl to make the picture look prettier and to make the animal stand out.

4. Use camera tricks.

If you have a fancypants camera and can control the ISO setting, try setting it up higher so that it’s more sensitive to light. Usually ISO 400 works best for tide pooling. If your fancypants camera also allows you to control the aperture, try to pick a higher aperture number (for example, F10). Higher aperture numbers make it so that more of the animal is in focus when you take a picture. This is especially great for tiny tide pool animals. Higher aperture numbers require more light than lower numbers, however, so this will only work well if it’s really bright and sunny outside.

Of course, it’s always fun to experiment within the range. This is a difficult shot: Here, a large (2.5′) Sunflower Star is captured 3 feet deep in the water, 5 feet overhead, at dusk with a higher ISO of 500 and a lower aperture of 1.8:

So, of course, ultimately there really is no formulaic way to photograph intertidal life. There are tips for reducing annoying things like blur, glare and distortion, but when it comes down to taking pictures of these critters, it’s just like taking pictures of anything else: you’ve got to experiment and try different angles and different settings. The Sunflower Star can look dim and ethereal when photographed as it is, above….or it can look brilliant as it does, below:

And here you have a molting crab on the beach at low tide–at NIGHT with a flash (tide pools at night? now THAT’S fun!!!):

So make a date this spring to go tide pooling with your camera and try out these tips. Fill up a whole card and then upload your favorites to The Boy’s Almanac Flickr Pool so you can share your cool finds! We’d love to see them!

Happy tide pooling!!!