April 5, 2009
The Role of Underwater Photography In Ocean Research
By Stuart Halewood
We’ve all heard the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But to a modern ocean scientist or researcher an accurate image can be worth a whole lot more than that.
In these days of rapidly expanding photographic methods and hardware allowing the melding together of previously unrelated fields of science and the art of photography, the value of a good image is going through the roof.
Why exactly is this so? Well, let’s consider a few examples of the role that underwater photography takes in relation to ocean research.
Take an obvious one, species ddentification. There is hardly a better or faster tool than today’s underwater camera set up to capture a marine subject. We all appreciate a good ID book, but for the researcher the image represents a mass of valuable data. Learning how to take not only a good picture but one that also exhibits the organism’s unique taxonomic identifiable features is of course due to the photographer’s skill and a fair amount of perseverance mixed with luck!
For a species identification shot, it’s important to include identifiable features rather than just be aesthetically pleasing.
Undeniably the educational merit of the sub-surface image is far reaching and diverse: from a teaching tool for trainee Reef survey divers allowing them to collect reliable data, to a photographer publishing a rare species or behavior on the internet and that image then having the chance of appearing in any home across the world. Let us also not forget that as underwater photographers we can make the lay person more aware of what lies beneath the ocean surface in the most unique ways, as well as informing the next generation how life in the ocean affects us all.
Divers participate
in Reef survey training.
We can be the eyes of the person who may never be lucky enough to slip beneath the surface of the ocean themselves.
But wait, back to science and technology! The use of a new generation of cameras allows us to view and record things that would have been impossible –10 years ago. For example:
* The flying eyeball camera is deployed to the sea-bed and takes a picture when it contacts it, allowing extrapolation of seabed sediment particulate size and type
* Hi-speed cameras measure the speed of a mantis shrimp spearing a fish.
* The time-lapse camera sits patiently on the seabed and records bat stars moving not aimlessly but toward each other and touching arms in some sort of communication.
* The in-situ reef camera captures a glimpse of the unknown fish species.
* The deep ocean stereo camera comes face-to-face with the giant squid.
* The camera and strobe fitted with fluorescent filters allows juvenile corals to be seen and counted.
The list goes on and a separate article could be written on each one.
Working in concert with the camera and photographer is the analysis and editing software. This variety of software can expand the image’s usage to a huge degree. Software can now digitize an image and count individual organisms to give spatial densities and abundance, and can go so fine scale as to be able to interpret individual sand grain size and chemical composition of a sea floor without the need of a physical grab sample. This type of non-destructive sampling is especially important to other researchers in fields such as underwater archaeology in identifying artifacts and creating photo mosaics of an entire site. This processing software will evolve in the future and it is hard to say what information may be harvested down the road. The one thing that is certain is that we will continually have to keep upgrading our computers to keep up with our cameras.
If that is not enough there are many more examples of important uses of underwater photography out there; however I’d like to end with one of the most obvious but most essential. That is, highlighting the plight of our world’s marine organisms and habitats. I think that the use of evocative and often shocking images to demonstrate the ongoing damage done to an ecosystem or species by our neglect and lack of foresight is something that the average person rarely sees and is the most important role of all.
Through your camera lens you don’t just capture a visual image, rather you preserve a whole world, one to be studied and hopefully better understood by all.
This article was first published on Dive Photo Guide.
Posted by Dida at April 5, 2009 12:16 PM
