Beyond Good Dive Practice, Photo Technique and Image Workflow: A Lifetime’s Worth of Cardinal Rules and Core Concepts for Making the Best U/W Photographs Possible

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Boston Sea Rovers – Saturday, March 15, 2025

pm – pm | Room

$80.00 workshop fee, includes manual and resource links

Tom Easop has spent a lifetime photographing the underwater world. From this experience, he has developed Core Concepts and Cardinal Rules to optimize underwater image making. Using these concepts and rules led to unique, optimized practices, techniques and workflows. In this workshop I will teach you my concepts and rules as well as the resulting “hands-on” skills you can immediately put into practice. Organized chronologically before, during, and after a dive trip the topics include:

  • What to prioritize in your equipment budget
  • Preparing your equipment for travel and use
  • Best practices before and after the dive
  • Speed light vs. continuous light, tripods, backscatter tactics
  • White point(s)
  • Focus tactics – not wasting depth of field
  • Automatic vs. manual exposure tactics
  • Recognizing your luck, learning from ‘mistakes’
  • Making ‘mistakes’, making your own ‘luck’
  • Combining techniques
  • Safe capture storage
  • File types, Pixel Geography, color space & ‘The Color Dimension’
  • Lightroom vs. Photoshop, and other applications for post-processing
  • Combining digital tools
  • HDR, image masking
  • HRLA USM, sharpening
  • Non destructive workflow
  • Cataloguing images & session folders
  • Plus planning, testing, and practicing

This is by far the most valuable workshop I have ever developed, imparting the most important information I’ve learned through photography and retouching schools, shooting and print making workshops, research, underwater camera building, and most of all – 45 years of experience of underwater photography. It will be time well spent for any underwater photographer or videographer regardless of skill level.

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Underwater Exposure & Lighting (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Boston Sea Rovers – Saturday, October 2, 2021

1:00pm – 4:00pm | Manchester Room

$75.00 workshop fee, includes manual

Unlike my ‘Advanced Fundamentals’ workshops, where light and lighting are only a part of the material (and featured after other topics) this workshop is dedicated to lighting underwater. And it is packed with real world examples and applications of lighting as well as some of the underlying fundamental concepts.

The goal is for everyone to learn:

EXPOSURE:
Camera settings
Balancing ambient and artificial sources

LIGHT:
Direction
Intensity / duration
Color
Specularity

WATER:
And it’s effect on light

PLUS:
Shooting manual
Shooting auto+
Speed-light (flash)
Continuous light
Color versus black and white
Multiple exposure
Long exposure

Advanced Fundamentals for Underwater Image Makers 3.0

Boston Sea  Rovers- Saturday, March 9, 2019

1:00pm – 4:00pm

This is a three hour workshop covering fundamental concepts of underwater imaging. These concepts are part of both modern digital imaging (capture, post processing) and age-old analog underwater photography limitations (color, focus, angle of view .) Understanding these concepts is vital if you are:

  • Trying to optimize your image quality
  • Researching a purchase of new equipment
  • Fix particular problems in your images

Behind all the ‘bells and whistles’ tools, settings and product features available to the modern underwater image-maker, there are some fundamental concepts that will never change, and should be understood if you are to advance in making better and better photographs.

Why?

Most of these ‘bells and whistles’ are short cuts – ‘one size fits all applications’. They do not work on every image, especially the ones we want them to work on the most! You need to know how to get to the heart of the problem and fix it yourself .

Other ‘bells and whistles’ are simply best fit technology that is limited in the first place. But it is all we have so you need to know where it will and will not work. And know the work-arounds if available.

And of course there is ‘Marketing BS’ where camera, housing, lighting and software sales folks tell a story about their products which upon deeper looking, don’t quite hold up to scrutiny.

Have ever asked yourself:

  • Why is the water column in my picture not smooth but instead has ‘banding’?
  • Why can’t I get the color on screen or in a print to match the color I remember seeing on the dive?
  • Why are my corners all blurry?
  • Why does my underwater lighting look so harsh?
  • Why does my camera / lighting system not work as planned on the dive?

To get answers, we will explore the ins-and-outs of underwater port optics, underwater lighting, camera features and settings, filter use, tripod use, color theory, color management, image noise, file types, workflow, and printing and displaying images.

Contact: Tom Easop +1 (603) 283 6630 or tom@EASOPhotography.com

Workshop Outline

In Water Analog

  • Optics
    • Water Column
    • Ports
      • Flat
      • Dome
        • Entrance Pupil Alignment
        • Focus
      • Others
    • Shades
      • Inside
      • Outside
      • Custom / Combination
  • Camera Settings
    • Aperture Size
    • Shutter Speed
    • Display
  • Lighting
    • Speedlight (Flash)
    • Continuous Light
    • Color Filtering

In Camera and Computer Digital

  • Color Theory
    • Color Modes
    • White Point
    • Color Space
  • Color Technology
    • Capture Methods
    • Noise
    • Color Dimensions, Gamut, Tone Curve
    • RAW Image Development
    • Levels, Curves, Color Adjustments
    • File types
    • Color Space Changes

Diving In – Putting It All Together

  • Preparing  – Research, Testing
  • Best Practices Before, During and After the Dive
  • A Hybrid Analog  – Digital Workflow