Photographs are a way of sharing a point of view, and of providing an aid to our physical and emotional past. I need these reminders, and have done since ancient times when a young woman from Corinth named Dibutade supposedly invented the art of drawing when her lover was about to embark on a long journey. But our memories cannot be trusted, and one of the many things that Bingham is missing out on is the undoubted pleasure of being able to look at tangible evidence of a place once visited.

As picture editors will attest, we recall photographs imprecisely. Often we are convinced we have seen certain things in a picture, perhaps even one that is familiar, and yet when we look at it again, it is not exactly as we remembered it.So a photograph can be an important corrective,even to the memory of a photograph itself.

The great adventurers — Darwin, Humboldt, Hedin, and most early travel photographers — made their important journeys while they were young, and they used the memories of these adventures in later life, perhaps to write memoirs or entertain their friends, or to return to the darkroom to reprint favourite negatives. Today, there is still a good deal of adventuring in early life, and inexpensive air travel can keep us regularly on the move. But there is also a rapidly increasing band of pension-age seniors on the road with cameras. Photography and computers offer endless stimulation for retirement, and some believe that older people may achieve better results than youngsters, as they might more easily win their subjects’ confidence.

Today let us share some interesting historical story about colour. Colour remained an expensive and secondary medium until the 1960s, a century after the discovery that colour could be built up from three monochromatic images of red, green and blue(RGB). In Russia, Sergeii Prokudin-Gorskii took pictures using a camera with three separate lenses, each with a coloured filter. The three plates were then projected simultaneously onto a screen, as a magic lantern. His pictures so impressed Tsar Nicholas II that he was given a locomotive with a darkroom carriage and from 1909 to 1915 he travelled throughout Russia taking some 6,000 photographs. He moved to the US and in 1948 the Library of Congress inherited 2.000 images, which they have been reconstructing.

Burton Holmes, a showman in the Daguerre mould, could fill the Carnegie Hall with his travelogues of hand-painted photographs, first shown as magic lantern slides and, later, movies. For 60 years, until his death in 1952, he travelled the world in summer and lectured in winter. The Burton Holmes Travelogues, first published in 10 volumes in 1910, became a household name across America. The first successful commercial film was autochrome, marketed in 1903 by the Lumiere brothers in France. Early films of the world in colourful autochrome were orchestrated by French banker Albert Khan. From 1909 until I929, he was sending film makers to capture all they saw in some 50 countries.

Subjects were no longer monumental and grand, but domestic and social. Professional photographers such as Eugene Atget in Paris began taking city scenes, while static pictures from studios and cartcs dc visites gave way to more realistic representations. Inspiration no longer came from the old masters’ views, but the real-life images that were flickering onto the screens of moving pictures.

The first world war brought a new view of the world: from the sky. Aerial photography became part of daily reconnaissance life on the Front, and when the war was over pilots went off to train airmen around the world. There was money to be made in aerial photography, too. Standing, with one leg strapped to the passenger seat of his aircraft so he could lean out holding his camera, Captain Alfred G. Buckham found a living making aerial photographs of city skylines, much of them put together in the darkroom, where cloud effects and passing planes were added.

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Shooting underwater

The majority of people in the world will never scuba dive, and sharing your underwater photographs is a great way to show them some of the exotic creatures that inhabit the sea. Whether in the Red Sea, oft the Yucatan or on the Great Barrier Reef, excited newbie divers straight from their first open-water dives often ask experienced underwater photographers how best to get started taking pictures in this new environment. The advice they get is not always what they want to hear. It’s most likely to go something like this: “go away and do 200 dives and then come back and ask me again”. There is a good reason for this answer. Once you are completely relaxed in the underwater world and everything you do there becomes second nature then you may be ready for the underwater photography challenge. It's difficult because when you underwater the environment could be complicated than what you expect, greater depths dull your senses, make colours disappear, and it is not easy to ask fish or other water creature to follow your order totally.

Once you become committed to photography in the briny you will be tempted to start breaking the basic dive rules, such as:

1. Holding your breath to get closer to fish because air bubbles spook them.
2. Running low on air because the best photo opportunities always seem to come at the very end of a dive.
3. Seeing an interesting photo subject below and then going to a greater depth than you first intended.

Try not to break the rules and try not to break the coral (perfect buoyancy control with your BCD should keep you off the fragile coral reef).

Equipment - A waterproof camera

Your ideal option is either a compact camera or a DSLR in an under water housing. One or better still two underwater flash units will bring lost colours back to life. Seawaer carries many organisms which reduce visibility and make your pictures look hazy and as though snow is falling when you use flash. The best way to reduce this is to use an ultra wide lens (10.5 or 16mm fisheye, 20 mm prime behind a dome port), get very close to your subject and mount your flashes on long flexible arms so they side light rather than illuminate snow like particles in front of the lens. Because light falls away quickly underwater upward angled shots will give you nice light from the surface. Working on manual exposure, meter the surface ambient light first and then aim a little flash, again using manual flash power settings, on to close objects in your foreground. TTL metering usually works well for macro when there is not much light in the background.

Each photo taken under water is precious and represents a unique experience, to give your photo a perfect visual effect, you need a quick photo retouch