Water World – Underwater B&W

To be honest, I stumbled on this by accident, and I’m really happy I did. While on a short vacation we had access to a swimming pool and there my daughter and I started to fool around with underwater shots. She was eager to show all the acrobatic tricks she could do, and I thought it was just fun to test my underwater housing for my Canon G16. So far nothing special or tricky. Once we were back home I forgot about these shots until I was playing a bit with old shots to see how my B&W conversion would work on them. And yes I made a mistake with a few settings and before I knew I was surprised by the unexpected result. Luckily we created several underwater shots that day so soon I was trying my experiment on these as well. And again I loved the end result.

It is nothing fancy but for some strange reason it totally suits my style. Not having enough time to spend in the swimming pool with my little girl I actually forgot about this. Until we went on vacation to Italy and started to swim in the lake (Lago di Como). I took a few shot and so did my wife. when I saw these shots on my laptop I again tried the same trick and I got a similar result. So without further ado here the photos I am talking about. I know for sure that I will try more of this and will try to get the perfect pose and so.

So what did I do? First of all I did my standard setting with the highlights (all the way down) and my shadows (all the way up) in Lightroom. Then I corrected the blacks and whites to get the fake HDR look, upped the clarity to gain more local contrast and then I exported my image to SilverEfex 2 of Niksoft. Here I chose to add a lot of structure (each area on its own) and darken the shadows. At the end I played with the different color filters so darken the color of the water. So you basically use the color of the water to emphasize this color so it becomes darker. The first series the water was really blue and in the lake I had to work with the color green. You have to do this on trial and error. Once done back to Lightroom for the finishing touches. Its that simple. Please let me know what you think of these photos in the comments.

The rest of the images can be found in the Water World gallery