Photographing toys in water – A response

Shelly recently posted about the basics of photographing toys in water. And with a bit of persuading towards myself on her part, I got thinking about my own experiences of getting wet whilst taking toy photographs (As usual I’m sorry my writing effort is so slow Shelly).

I think it’s safe to say whilst Shelly’s love for the water (and her favourite puddle) always come across in both her photography and her blog writing. My feelings about the water differ just a bit.

For me it’s significantly more like a love, hate relationship that I work through. As water adds a layer of uncertainty that I don’t really get from other setups.

On “dry land”, things not only tend to stay where you put them. But you can take your time, adjust, rethink, and refine your setup. Most of my photography is quite a slow process. And in water, everything feels short term and temporary.

I get nervous and unsettled as either:

• Your toys move
• The surface continues to change
• The light shifts even more with reflections
• Your feet are usually getting wet

I’ve learnt some lessons over time, like having waterproof boots or swimming shoes with me for those wet feet. So hopefully I will share a few more insights to add to Shelly’s before the end of this post.

Just to be clear I don’t want to be all negative about it though. I’m typically pleased with the results of photographs involving water, it’s just the challenge of getting there for me. But as the saying goes… what doesn’t wash your camera into the Atlantic Ocean only makes you stronger. That’s how it goes right?

Lego floats, just never in a helpful way

On this note I completely agree with Shelly, whilst technically it floats (and never upright), Lego doesn’t really cooperate when it comes to water. Sometimes it sits a bit too deep in the water, sometimes it drifts off in the wrong direction, and sometimes it just slowly rotates away from the position you carefully set up about 10 seconds earlier. Which means most of the time, it isn’t actually doing what it is “suppose to do” at all.

For a lot of these photographs, I’ve ended up building something just out of sight to hold everything in place. A few stones just under the surface can help, but usually it’s a case of using some wire to make a frame under the surface.

It’s one of those parts of the process that doesn’t really show in the final image, but makes the difference between getting the shot and watching your figure slowly disappear downstream.

And even then, it’s usually a temporary solution at best. You get a short window where everything is where it should be, and then it isn’t again.

Open water is a different kind of beast

Taking photographs near any moving water, especially the sea, adds several more layers of stress.

Whilst trying to think about composition, you’re also constantly watching the environment:

• Where the waves or tide may be
• How quickly they’re building
• Whether the next one is coming further in than the last

It becomes difficult to fully concentrate on the photography when part of your attention is always on what the water is doing. There’s always a moment where you’re aware that your camera is closer to the water than it probably should be. And occasionally, that calculation is wrong. Think the water will do one thing and I promise you it will suprise you by doing something else.

Because I often invert my tripod to get the camera as low as possible, it’s usually much closer to the water than I’m every comfortable with. Unfortunately, the Atlantic Ocean isn’t an officially supported accessory. My camera was keen to tell me this after the tide wash over my camera. An evening of using my hotel hairdryer to dry the flash hot shoe eventually solved the problem.

The challenge is that the conditions creating the most interesting photographs are often the same conditions that make me the most nervous. Calm water is predictable, but crashing waves, spray and rougher conditions can add movement, atmosphere and a sense of scale that’s difficult to create any other way.

Most of the time it becomes a mad balancing act between protecting the equipment and waiting for the moment when everything comes together.

The timing of water has a mind of it’s own

One way I’ve found to reduce my stress levels slightly is to move the toys further away from the water.

The camera stays a little safer, the figures stay where I put them (mostly, the wind is still a joy as it always is in toy photography), and I can still use the sea as part of the image.

But whether you’re close to the water or keeping a safe distance, the challenge remains the same: the background is constantly changing.

A wave breaks exactly where you want it and you’ve not finished adjusting the figure. You finally get the composition right and the sea suddenly looks flat. Or the best waves arrive just as you’re reviewing the previous image on the back of the camera. Unlike our toys, something like the ocean isn’t interested in waiting for you to be ready.

As a result, these photographs often involve a lot of patience and an unreasonable number of frames. Once the composition is set, I tend to leave everything alone and keep shooting as the conditions change behind the subject. Eventually the combination of figure, light and wave all line up in a way that works.

The practical lesson here is simple: charge your spare batteries, make sure there’s space on your memory card, and accept that luck is going to play a role. Sometimes the perfect wave arrives in the first few frames. Sometimes it takes considerably longer.

Controlled water isn’t necessarily easier to manage

For some photographs using water I’ve started using a fish tank. It can be a relatively cheap setup, works in a controlled environment, and removes many of the things that make me nervous about photographing toys in water out in the being wide world.

You remove wind, changing weather conditions, movement in the water and, perhaps most importantly, the possibility of losing your camera in a river or the tides of the sea. Personally it allows me to slow down and spend more time refining a particular setup.

It also creates opportunities that are difficult to achieve outdoors. Whilst I can place toys in water outside, photographing them from an underwater perspective is another challenge entirely. My dual focus anamorphic lens certainly wasn’t designed to be submerged, I’m never going to find an underwater casing that works with that..

A fish tank lets me create photographs that feel as though they were taken beneath the surface whilst keeping all of my equipment safely on dry land (read, on a tripod in my kitchen).

I’ve found freshly filled water is often a little too perfect though. Straight from the tap it’s clean, clear and lacks many of the details we associate with water in the real world.

The challenge then becomes making that controlled environment look believable. To help create a sense of depth and scale, I’ve experimented with adding small particles to the water (salt, dirt and more) and disturbing the surface (good vibrations if you will) before taking a photograph.

Lighting also becomes an important part of the process. Light passing through water and glass behaves differently, creating reflections, shadows and highlights that can help sell the illusion of truly being underwater.

A fish tank removes much of the unpredictability of photographing toys in water, but it also opens up creative possibilities that would be impossible for me to achieve outdoors.

Reflections vs focus (you don’t really get both)

Another thing I’ve found is that whilst water gives you awesome reflections, this doesn’t come without its challenges.

Once you line everything up, get nice and low to the surface with your camera (gulp), and you think the reflection looks great… You then realise your subject and the reflection aren’t actually at the same depth when it comes to focusing. One is slightly closer, the other slightly further away, and you cannot get both in focus.

Stopping down the aperture certainly helps in an attempt to get the two closer to being in focus together, but there’s usually a limit and still a decision to make about what you want the viewer to notice first. You have to fully commit to one of them.

Since learning this lesson, I’ve ended up deciding which part of the resulting image needs to matter most and work from there. If the reflection is a key part of the composition, then I’m happy for the figure to be a little softer. If the subject is the focus of the story, then the reflection becomes more of a supporting element.

Over time I’ve found that this is less of a limitation and more of a creative choice. Water gives you an extra element to work with, and deciding how much emphasis to give the reflection can completely change the feel of the story you are trying to tell.

It’s one of those things that isn’t immediately obvious when you start photographing in water, but once you understand it, reflections become another tool you can use rather than something you’re fighting against.

After all this “positivity”, why do I still keep doing it?

After reading all of that, you might be wondering why I keep taking photographs involving water at all. And it’s a fair question. The honest answer is that whilst I clearly don’t enjoy the process as much as Shelly clearly does, I do enjoy the results.

Water can add movement, reflections, atmosphere and scale in a way that’s truly unique, and impossible to recreate with any other element. A puddle can become a lake. A small wave can feel like a storm. A fish tank can become an underwater world. For all the uncertainty it introduces, water scales beautifully with all sorts of toys and has a habit of making things feel bigger than they really are.

Perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to it. Not because I’ve suddenly learned to relax whilst standing in the sea, wondering whether my camera is about to get another unwanted soaking. Nor because I’ve developed an emotional attachment to wet boots. But because every now and then everything comes together.

When the light is right. The reflections work. The waves behave themselves for a fraction of a second. And the resulting photograph captures something that simply wouldn’t exist without the water being involved.

So whilst Shelly will probably continue to enjoy photographing toys in water far more than I do, I suspect I’ll keep returning to it from time to time. Just preferably with waterproof footwear on a day with predictable weather and a respectful distance from the Atlantic Ocean.