Cheryl Walsh’s Floating World of Underwater Senior Portraits

When Orange County-based photographer Cheryl Walsh (no relation to the writer) first started taking the underwater portraits that have since become her signature, she did so not to appease a client or win an award, but rather as a means of overcoming the anxiety disorder she lives with on a daily basis. 

“Once I get in the water, everything is quiet and calm,” she explains. “I can sink to the bottom of the pool and hold my breath for a really long time. When I’m out of the water, I can drown; but when I’m under, I’ll never drown.”

AQUATIC BEGINNINGS
Walsh first started taking her underwater images—which feature teenagers dressed up in fairytale-like costumes, suspended against a backdrop that suggests a heavenly ether—after meeting with fellow photographer John Michael Cooper at WPPI in Las Vegas a few years ago. 

“He gave me permission to let go of traditional thinking and embrace the artistic and motivational reasons for taking photographs,” she explains. In essence, he told her that the necessary component for taking a great image is not technical skill, but rather figuring out what story you want to tell. For Walsh, the story was about conquering her fears, which she expressed in her portraits of others.

At the time, the self-taught Walsh was taking modeling portfolios and headshots for teenagers who attended school with her two daughters at the Orange County School of the Arts. After many years of shooting wedding and baby portraits, she had finally found her niche in senior portraits, adding with a laugh that “people are constantly asking me, ‘Oh, so you take portraits of old people?’”

Rather, Walsh focuses exclusively on 16-to-18-year-olds graduating from high school. “They are still kind of kids, but they are also sort of adults, which makes them such a joy to work with,” she says. Her senior portraits make up the bulk of her commercial business, which she runs under the title “Alt Senior.” 

“I listen to [each subject’s] story and capture it for them so they can never forget who they were at this amazing and important time in their life.”

POOL PROCESS
Walsh photographs her underwater portraits in the pool in her backyard carefully controlling the environment in order to get the effect she wants. She only shoots from the end of June until the end of October, when the light is at its highest and there aren’t a lot of clouds in the sky. 

Because the underwater environment needs to be absolutely pristine and clear, she only shoots twice a week, to give time for the special filter she has installed to clean the water. The chlorine level, maintained by a pool technician, is kept very low, and when she’s not shooting, she keeps the surface protected with a solar cover. “It took a good three years of mostly practicing to figure out what I was looking for,” she explains. “I mastered the technical aspects first so that all I had to think about was the art.”

To get the overall effect she wants, Walsh shoots under a shade suspended over the pool. She places subjects just below the surface of the water, so that she captures their reflections. She uses two different types of fabric backgrounds—one white, one black—depending on whether she wants the image to look like it was taken during the day or taken at night.

Walsh uses a Canon 5D Mark III with a 16-25mm f/2.8 lens and an underwater housing created by Ewa-Marine. She’s tried shooting with a flash system at night but has never liked the results, so instead she shoots during the day, modifying the light balance in Photoshop during post-production. Her biggest challenge is capturing shadows from clouds in the mostly cloudless Southern California sky.

When Walsh photographs her muses, the models themselves also have to fit a specific type in order to work well in the shots: She prefers working with dancers (as opposed to swimmers) who are shorter than 5’5″ (or else they will struggle to float in the relatively shallow water) and usually young women, because their long hair and clothing flow well.

UNDERWATER CHALLENGE
Because keeping the environment is expensive (running the pump costs over $800 a month and replacing the water in the pool costs $1,000 per week) Walsh mostly shoots underwater portraits for personal projects or takes on clients for a privately determined fee. “There’s not a huge market out there for underwater portraits,” she explains.

Whether the subject is a client paying her for a session or a dancer acting as a muse, she makes sure to meet with them for a consultation first. She requires that a parent is there so that they can all talk about the complicated process. “It’s not easy,” she says of the posing process. “It’s important that my models can come out of the experience feeling good.”

She requires that subjects wear shades of red, yellow, orange or purple—anything green or blue looks terrible in the aquamarine water, Walsh says. Before the shoot, subjects must loofah their bodies to get rid of dead skin and scrub their hair with a clarifying shampoo. For her muses, Walsh often provides fantasy-inspired, Victorian-esque clothing by Pendragon Costumes, which she says are so well made that they can be used again and again.

Because her subjects often have trouble adjusting to the underwater environment, she exercises patience. “I give them one instruction at a time,” she says. These include giving them a place to look so that they can open their eyes underwater, or weighing down their clothing with chains so that they hang in the way she wants. “Finding something that clicks usually takes an hour.”

Walsh’s ultimate goal, along with making enough money to support the environment she needs to create the images she loves, is making her work competition-worthy. Thus far, she has won multiple WPPI print and image awards, as well as last year’s Canon Camera International CPS Image of the Year Award. “I try to do better every year,” she explains. “It’s a huge motivator.”

In the end, whether or not the client is a paid customer or a model, the final image is all the story Walsh is telling. “It’s about the difficulty of trying to do it all—they are wearing these perfect outfits, living a perfect life, and yet they are still falling,. The series is not about falling into failure. It’s about falling into relaxing.”

Creating Cheryl Walsh’s Otherworldly Effect in 3 Steps
1. Color Correct: Because RAW files come out of the camera looking “very flat and mostly aqua,” Walsh first corrects contrast, color and the sharpness of an image using Lightroom presets: the Topaz Clarity plug-in for contrast and sharpness, and the Portraiture plug-in for skin.

2. Add Layers: Getting the hair, face and dress just perfect in one image is “a miracle that might happen once in each photo shoot,” so Walsh creates multi-layered images.

3. Final Touch: Walsh’s fabric backdrops become night skies or ethereal days when she covers them in Photoshop with layers of photos of clouds and textures she’s previously shot and kept as stock.

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