Image Focus

When an old friend showed me a project he had been working on, I knew I had to do something with it. That project was a light installation below a swimming pool, which, as a photographer began to fill my imagination with opportunities. It wasn’t long before I was chatting to the owner of the pool and began thinking up ideas, a few of which I did some test images of.

However, the owners of the pool asked if I could take some images of their daughters around the pool. I wasn’t so sure, I of course had my own ideas about what I wanted to do, but I agreed on the promise that I could visit the pool and come up with some ideas that we would both be happy with.

Over the next months there were many ideas and concepts; I researched all the little details like the correct colour and style of swimwear, and most importantly checking the weather forecast; it had to be a day without wind and with plenty of sun and blue skies. I wanted the pool to look as translucent as possible.

The day of the shoot had arrived and I spent much of my time photographing from a balcony overlooking the pool. I came down to thank the girls for being so patient with me after hours spent in the pool and just by chance I saw the image you see now. I couldn’t believe my luck and everything seemed to just fit in to place.

I was shooting with the Sony Alpha 7R III with the FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens. I lost almost 2Ev of light as I was using a polariser filter to cut down reflection on the water. To keep all of the girls pin sharp in focus, I needed to make sure I had a big enough depth of field, so with the aperture at f/13 I pushed the sensitivity to ISO 320 knowing that with the incredible sensor I could still make a very large print without seeing any image noise.

Although I shoot in raw, I have my JPEG image preview set to my own specification so it sets the mood for me on how I will tweak the raw version when I am editing in the studio. In this case it was set to Vivid, but with the Saturation set lower than normal.

Usually I would have set my camera up on a tripod for this type of shot, but time was of the essence; the girls had already been in the water for 2 or 3 hours so I knew I needed to get the image before the magic had gone. Somehow, we all just managed to get that last boost of adrenalin and get something quite magical from the day.

I love the tranquillity and peacefulness of the image, but what you don’t see is the many weeks of planning that went in to even getting the shoot to take place.