Bubbles & Lenses Underwater Photography

Handling backscatter

02/06/2026 #underwaterphotography #editingunderwater #tipscontributed by Van (@thalassoan_miniatures)

If you spend enough time shooting underwater, you will eventually encounter one of the most persistent visual challenges: backscatter. Those tiny white dots floating across like in a snow storm can be frustrating, especially when your subject looks exceptional. But dread not! Like most technical obstacles, backscatter becomes manageable once you understand its nature and learn how to work with (and around) it.

This article breaks down what backscatter is, why it appears, what it says about the water you’re diving in, and the practical ways to reduce or correct it, both in the water and in post-production.

What Is Backscatter?

Backscatter refers to the bright, suspended particles that appear as white specks or “snow” in photos taken underwater. These particles reflect your camera’s light source (video lights, strobes, camera flash) back into the lens, creating an effect similar to driving with high-beam in a snowy storm.

Backscatter is not a flaw in your equipment. It is simply the camera faithfully recording what is physically present in the water column between your lens and your subject.

In this photo, suspended silt was showering the nudibranch (Hypselodoris bullockii). The ambient light, together with the video light hung above the camera and angled downwards and towards to right, illuminated the flakes form the top left corner, thus revealing their presence. Notice how the flakes are less visible in the bottom right corner of the image, in the shadows.

Where Does Backscatter Come From?

These pesky underwater particles fall into several categories:

1. Sediment

Sediments are composed of mineral particles such as sand, silt, and clay. They originate primarily from terrestrial runoff, coastal erosion, river discharge, and seabed resuspension caused by waves, currents, boat traffic, or marine tourism (diving, snorkeling).

Following rainfall 🌧️, sediments are carried by streams and runoff from land into coastal waters, where they accumulate. Fine silt and clay can travel far offshore before slowly settling, particularly in bays or shallow shelves, where they may remain suspended for extended periods. Once deposited, even slight natural movements (currents or tides) or anthropogenic disturbances (anchors ⚓️, propellers, or divers with poor buoyancy control) can significantly reduce visibility. Silt is notably one of the primary hazards when penetrating wrecks and caves, where it can rapidly eliminate all visual references.

📷 Photographically, sediments produce harsh, bright, high-contrast specks with sharp edges.

Sediment heavy scene

Organic detritus from local fish farms, accumulating in the bay

2. Marine Snow

Marine snow forms a continuous rain of organic particles composed primarily of dead or dying plankton, microscopic organisms, mucus aggregates, maine poop 💩, and fragmented biological material.

It is a fundamental energy pathway in the ocean and a key mechanism of carbon absorption by the ocean ♻️, whereby carbon fixed by phytoplankton is transported away from the surface. As marine snow sinks into the abyss, it carries carbon and nutrients from the sunlit layers to deeper waters. In the deep sea, where sunlight-driven productivity (photosynthesis) is absent, many organisms depend heavily on marine snow as a steady food supply, occasionally supplemented by larger sinking food falls such as fish or whales.

📷 Photographically, marine snow tends to produce softer, more diffuse, rounded specks than mineral sediment.

3. Artificial Debris

Artificial debris is introduced into the water column through anthropogenic processes and results from the degradation, erosion, or fragmentation of man-made structures and materials.

Rust, paint flakes, microplastics , metal oxides, fiberglass fragments, and other industrial 🏭 or urban residues are most commonly encountered near shores and coastal infrastructure such as jetties, piers, harbors, and beaches. However, plastics and other artificial particles have now reached even the most remote environments on Earth, from uninhabited islands such as Henderson Island (Plastic Odyssey) to the deepest marine trenches (Peng et al, 2020).

📷 Photographically, artificial debris appears as irregular, sharply defined specks or flakes, sometimes elongated, angular, or plate-like. These particles may reflect light unevenly, producing distracting highlights that are difficult to predict or correct.

A sunken wreck, meant as an artificial reef, continuously sheds rust and paint

Even in between breaths, micro bubbles continue to surround the diver

4. (micro) Bubbles

Micro-bubbles are ubiquitous around divers, particularly those using open-circuit scuba, where they are continuously generated through breathing 🌬️ . They may also originate from surface agitation or boat traffic.

Divers often use rising bubbles as a visual reference for controlled ascent rates, especially after their safety stops 🛑 .

📷 Photographically, they reflect light so brightly that even the smallest ones will generate backscatter, especially when shooting around other divers.

When water Visibility Tells a Story

Now imagine yourself on the boat, excited for your dive. While the dive staff is busy getting ready, you peer over the side and try to read the water, but can barely make out the shadows of the reef below. Divers tell you visibility is typically anywhere from three to fifteen meters, depending on the season. It sounds like backscatter is already the third wheel to your buddy pair. As a photographer, how do you frame that challenge? If you cannot avoid it, how might you choose to include it in the story you are about to photograph?

You scan the coastline. Is there a river mouth nearby, even one you can’t see from the dive site? Sediment doesn’t need a dramatic estuary to arrive here. It can drift for kilometres along the coast, carried by currents after heavy rain upstream. If the land is farmed or industrial, what else might be riding along with those fine particles, nutrients, fertilizers, trace pollutants? As you look through the water, you begin to realize it is not just cloudy. It is carrying a history shaped far beyond the shoreline, one that will inevitably appear in your images.

Once underwater, you start to observe how the particles move. Some sink quickly, others hover, others pulse upward as the swell passes. As your light sweeps through the water, they appear and disappear, revealing motion rather than dirt. This isn’t just runoff arriving; it’s material being constantly lifted back into the water column. A sandy bottom stirred by waves, a silty slope brushed by a mild current, yesterday’s calm replaced by today’s surge. Visibility changes not because the sea is dirty, but because it is alive and moving, and your camera is recording that motion.

Then you notice a different texture altogether, flakes rather than grains, drifting slowly through the frame. Marine snow. Not foreign material arriving from elsewhere, but life processing what is already here. Tiny organisms feeding, growing, reproducing, dying, clumping together as they fall. Nutrients in the water, delivered by rivers, upwellings, or volcanic activity, fuel this cycle. More nutrients often mean more life, and more life means more organic matter passing your lens. Sometimes it becomes background texture; sometimes you might focus on it as the subject itself. But too much can overwhelm a system. Are there lobster farms nearby leaking organic waste, or an algal bloom triggered by excess fertilizer runoff?

You begin connecting what you see to what lives here. If this water is rich, what does that mean for the animals you are trying to photograph? Are there more fish, not just in number but in diversity? Are schools tighter, larger, more confident? Do individuals appear heavier, slower to flee, less startled by your approach? In some places, especially near volcanic islands or nutrient upwellings, the water is rarely clear, yet the reef feels crowded with life. Bigger fish don’t always live in postcard-blue water, and not all dive sites are meant to be photographed as pristine.

You start comparing sites in your mind. Why does this bay feel different from the one further north, even though they look similar on a map? Is the coastline shaped in a way that traps sediments? Does the seabed slope gently here, allowing material to resuspend easily, while a nearby wall drops steeply and stays clearer? As you shoot, backscatter becomes a way to read underwater topography without seeing it directly, revealing contours through how particles hang, drift, or clear away.

As a photographer, the particles force you to slow down and look more carefully. This water is not empty space; it is an active layer full of clues. Every bright dot revealed by your light reminds you that you are photographing inside a system, not above it. The challenge isn’t only to get closer or light more carefully, but to understand why the water looks the way it does, and what that says about the place, the life it supports, and the forces shaping it long before you entered the frame. When you stop seeing particles as noise and start seeing them as information, light becomes less a tool for fighting backscatter and more a way of deciding which parts of that story you allow into the frame.

Managing Backscatter in Camera & in post

In Camera 📷

Backscatter is created the moment your light meets suspended matter between the lens and the subject. The first and most effective decisions are therefore made before pressing the shutter, often before even raising the camera.

The most obvious variable is distance 📏 . The closer you are to your subject, the less water you photograph, and the fewer particles your light has a chance to reveal. And for that, going macro is the way to go. You approach your subject deliberately, choosing animals that tolerate proximity, and composing with intent rather than convenience. Every extra centimeter of water is another layer of particles waiting to reflect light back at you.

Light 🔦 placement matters more than light power. When light travels straight ahead, it illuminates everything in its path, including the water itself. This is why backscatter often increases when light is pointed directly in the direction of the lens. You are not lighting the subject; you are lighting the water in front of it. Changes in where light enters the scene can dramatically change what becomes visible.

Angle 📐 is just as important as position. Particles reflect light most strongly when the light source, the particle, and the lens are aligned. Breaking that alignment reduces how much light returns to the camera. This is why particles often flare when shooting head-on (like when using the camera's internal flash) and fade when light approaches from the side. You may not eliminate backscatter entirely, but you can decide whether it dominates the frame or quietly recedes.

Sometimes the answer is not to remove backscatter, but to control how much of it appears. Narrowing your composition, using negative space, playing with your cone of light, or strategically placing the subject against darker backgrounds can prevent illuminated particles from overwhelming the image. In some conditions, selectively lighting the subject (using a snoot) creates separation without requiring perfectly clear visibility.

Equally important is knowing when not to add light. In shallow water with strong ambient light ☀️ , artificial lighting can sometimes introduce more backscatter than it solves. Allowing ambient light to shape the scene may produce softer, more coherent images, especially when particles are dense and evenly distributed.

Finally, awareness matters. Watching how particles respond as you move, how they swirl when a fin kicks too close to the bottom 🌪️ , or how they brighten when your light sweeps across them gives immediate feedback. Backscatter is not random; it reacts to your position, your movements, and your choices.

This is the kind of awareness we develop throughout the Bubbles & Lenses course: learning to place and shape your video light or strobe so it reveals the shape and textures of a subject without lighting the water unnecessarily, and knowing when to let the particles remain, because they belong to the story you are telling. And once the dive is over, those same decisions continue on the editing screen, where the goal is not to erase the water, but to guide the eye through it.

2. In Post 🖥️

Post-production begins with restraint. No amount of editing can truly remove backscatter without consequence, and aggressive corrections often replace particles with unnatural textures or visible artifacts. The goal is not to make the water disappear, but to reduce distractions that pull attention away from the subject.

Global adjustments come first. Slightly reducing contrast or clarity can soften harsh specks without affecting the subject too severely. Moderation is needed here, as increasing clarity or texture globally often exaggerates backscatter, making particles sharper and more visually dominant.

Selective adjustments offer far greater control. Local tools, such as masks or brushes, allow you to work on the water and background independently from the subject. Subtle darkening, softening, or desaturation of open water areas can help particles fade into the background while preserving detail where it matters. These changes should remain invisible; if the correction is noticeable, it has gone too far.

Spot removal tools can be useful, but they should be applied selectively. Removing every visible particle often results in images that feel sterile and disconnected from their environment. Prioritize the most distracting elements, especially those intersecting the subject’s outline or drawing attention away from key focal points.

Cropping is often the most honest solution. If backscatter dominates part of the frame, reframing can strengthen the composition without heavy manipulation. This reinforces an important idea: composition does not end underwater, it continues on the editing screen.

Choosing What to Show

Managing backscatter is ultimately an editorial decision. You are choosing how much of the water itself becomes visible in the photograph. Sometimes clarity serves the subject. Other times, texture, haze, and particles provide context, depth, or atmosphere.

Clear water images are not inherently better, just as particulate-rich ones are not inherently flawed. Each carries information. The role of the photographer is not to deny the conditions, but to interpret them honestly and intentionally.

Backscatter challenges technique, but it sharpens perception. It slows you down, forces you closer, and pushes you to make deliberate choices rather than rely on habit. When handled thoughtfully, it stops being an obstacle and becomes part of the visual language of the image.