I am not a professional. I am a cruiser who got tired of describing the calanques to people at home and failing, and bought a cheap waterproof camera to do the describing for me. Three seasons later I have a small dry-bag of kit, a folder of pictures I am genuinely proud of, and a fairly hard-won sense of what works when you are shooting from a boat rather than a dive centre.
This is the practical version. Where the light is good, when the water is clear, what to carry, and the one set of rules that will get your camera confiscated if you ignore them.
Provence has the water, but not all year
The Mediterranean off Provence is the obvious place to start, because the visibility is in a different league to the Atlantic. On a settled day in the Marseille calanques you can get 15 to 20 metres of horizontal visibility, sometimes more off Port-Cros. That clarity is what makes underwater photography here worth the bother: light penetrates, colours hold, and a snorkeller with a 200 euro camera can come back with images that look deliberate.
Timing matters more than location, though. Early summer water is cold and often slightly green with plankton bloom. The sweet spot for clarity and warmth runs from roughly mid-July, when the surface settles into the 22C to 26C band, through to the calm spells of September and even October, when the water is still warm but the summer crowds have gone and the sea is often glassier. August is hot but busy, and the anchorages of the Hyeres islands get churned up by traffic, which is the enemy of a clear shot.
Avoid shooting in the first day after a mistral. The wind itself flattens nothing underwater, but the swell it leaves behind stirs sediment off the rocks and drops visibility to a few metres of soup. Wait a day after the wind dies and the water comes back.
Light is everything, and you have less than you think
Water eats light and eats colour, fast. Red disappears within the first few metres, which is why everything beyond snorkelling depth looks blue-green. Two things fix this.
The first is the sun. Shoot between roughly 10am and 2pm when the sun is high and punches straight down into the water. Early and late, the light comes in at an angle, reflects off the surface, and never reaches your subject. A bright overhead sun in clear Provencal water is doing most of your work for you.
The second is getting close. Every metre of water between your lens and your subject is a metre of colour loss and a metre of suspended particles fogging the image. The rule that changed my pictures: halve the distance, then halve it again. A fish photographed from a metre away looks washed out; the same fish from 30 centimetres looks like a postcard. This is why a wide-angle lens or wet lens beats a zoom underwater, because you physically move in rather than reaching with optics.
Kit that survives a cruising boat
A cruising boat is salt, sun, and limited space, and underwater kit hates all three. Keep it simple.
- A rugged compact or an action camera in a dedicated dive housing. The cheap "waterproof to 10m" rating on a phone case is not enough; a proper housing rated to 30 or 40m gives you margin and, crucially, survives being knocked against a hull. I have flooded one camera and it was always the cheap pouch.
- A red filter for anything below about 5 metres if you are shooting in available light. It corrects the colour cast for free, no strobe required.
- A small video light or strobe if you are serious. Even a 1000-lumen torch held off to one side restores the reds that depth steals. Off-axis lighting also kills the backscatter (those snowy dots) that ruins flash-on-camera shots in any water with particles.
- A float strap. Drop an unfloated camera in 20 metres of calanque and it is gone. This is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy.
Rinse everything in fresh water the moment you are back aboard, before the salt dries in the seals. A flooded housing is almost always a salt-crusted o-ring, not a manufacturing fault.
The marine reserve rules you cannot ignore
This is the part that turns a hobby into a fine. France protects large stretches of the Provencal coast, and the rules vary from "look but do not touch" to "do not enter".
Port-Cros national park is the strictest. The whole island is a no-take, no-anchor-on-seagrass reserve, spearfishing is banned, and in the most protected zones you may not even swim. Photographing is allowed in the open zones, but you must not touch, feed, or chase anything, and you certainly cannot collect. The Posidonia seagrass meadows that make the water so clear are themselves legally protected, which is why anchoring rules on this coast have tightened so much.
Practically, this means you anchor in sand well clear of the meadows, snorkel in, and behave like a guest. Do not stand on the bottom near coral or gorgonian fans, which take decades to grow back from a single careless fin-kick. The reward for behaving is that the protected zones hold the fish and the colour that the unprotected coast has lost.
What you will actually photograph
Manage your expectations and you will enjoy it more. The Mediterranean is not the Red Sea; decades of fishing have thinned the big stuff, and the protected reserves are where the life concentrates precisely because everywhere else has been emptied. What you do get is worth having.
Over rock and Posidonia in 3 to 10 metres you will find saddled sea bream, damselfish in clouds, wrasse, the occasional grouper in a protected zone (a real prize, as they were nearly fished out and are coming back inside the reserves), and octopus tucked into holes if you have the eye for them. The gorgonian fans in deeper, shaded water make wonderful foregrounds, deep red against the blue, but they grow at a centimetre or two a year, so a fin-kick that snaps one off undoes a decade. Posidonia meadows themselves photograph beautifully in low side-light and shelter fry, seahorses if you are very lucky, and the pinna nobilis fan mussel, a protected giant that you must never touch.
The smaller and slower your subject, the better your odds. Chasing fish produces blurry disappointment. Finding a static subject (an anemone, a moray peering from a hole, a starfish on sand) and working it patiently from close range produces the keepers.
A workflow that actually produces pictures
My routine is unglamorous. Anchor in sand on a settled forenoon, ideally somewhere with a rock wall in 3 to 8 metres so I have structure and fish without needing to free-dive deep. Camera floated, filter on if I am going below five metres, light clipped to my wrist. I shoot far more than I keep, and I shoot the same subject from three distances because I can never judge the colour loss underwater through a fogged mask.
The single biggest improvement to my photographs was learning to free-dive a little, calmly, so I could get below the surface glare and shoot upward with the sun behind the fish. You do not need to go deep. Three metres of breath-hold, relaxed, opens up angles a surface snorkeller never sees.
If the photography sparks an interest in what you are actually looking at, the same calanques are full of life worth eating as well as photographing, and I have written separately about catching and cooking seafood on the Atlantic coast. Different sea, same principle: respect what the protected reserves are protecting, and the unprotected water rewards you for it.
