Meet the gorgeous Sarah.
Model, horn player, dancer, diver, bird enthusiast(From her IG).
Getting back into Sydney and going through the pains and traumas of being financially hit hard by cybercriminals/hackers I needed to get my mind of things. Doing what I do best and getting creative especially to help release some inner steem I put out a post on a few FB groups for collaborations which have been the trend vs using sites like Model Mayhem or Starnow like a decade ago. From the respondents I ended up picking Sarah being the most experienced underwater.
The re-occurring theme or style in a lot of my underwater work is mystical, ethereal and mythological creatures which Is something that just happens in the process of creating rather then pre-planned.
The dresses used were sourced from the Philippines in the markets around Manila during a past trip for the jellyfish concept and the additional fabrics from our local Spotlight store. The background is black plastic sheeting. Getting the best water clarity is a major challenge and being the first pool shoot in a while I turned on the solar heater and filter while I cleaned the pool. This actually creates a lot of extremely fine bubbles coming out of the return outlets that create haze in the water so my solution was to do all the maintenance work a day before and leave it completely off until the shoots finished. Any debris will have also settled in the bottom.
In terms of equipment its Canon 5DmIII with 16-35mm f4L in Ikelite Housing and Dome using natural light. I also took some footage using the slowmotion feature of the Olympus TG5 which Im still editing into some sort of video clip.
Either way these are some of these photos are from my first Sydney underwater photo session for the year and we managed to get some great results.
Now just for my closing remarks.
Underwater model shoots is a self funded personal creative art project I do for the sake of creating art and also challenging myself technically to improve as a photographer. Aside from being extremely challenging in all aspects its also one of the most expensive and high risk due to cost of equipment, chance of equipment damage that insurers will not cover, safety for myself and the model/team. Always great to get some feedback, support or help finding sponsors/clients so I can keep these personal projects alive.
