Alphamarine Photography is running an underwater photography workshop event at Red Sea Diving Safari’s Marsa Shagra Village in March 2024. The event includes eight classroom sessions on different aspects of underwater photography given by Phil and Anne Medcalf over four days, and then repeated. The workshops will start on 12th March and run until the 19th, inclusive. There won’t be a need to attend any of the talks in a specific order. This rolling program approach means attendees can arrive at any time during or before the event, and as long as they are in the resort at least four out of the eight days, they can access all the talks. That, in turn, gives lots of flexibility with flight options.

The talks will cover exposure, composition, using light, and underwater photography styles and techniques. Each will be about 45 minutes long. Guests will also be able to access Anne and Phil for advice throughout the eight days of the event, not just during the days they attend talks. They’ll run impromptu sessions and give at least an hour’s one-to-one time with everyone who is booked on a workshop. There’ll also be a selection of demo equipment available to try, including wet lenses and strobes.

Between them, Phil and Anne have over 50 years of diving experience, and over 30 years of those have been spent taking digital pictures underwater. In that time, they’ve dived around the world, including many trips to the Red Sea, as well as Indonesia, the Maldives, Australia, and the UK. Together, they turned their interest into a business in 2017 and now own Alphamarine Photography, an underwater photography training and retail company. They have a highly rated blog on their website alphamarinephoto.com and a Facebook Q&A group with over 2000 members worldwide. They’ve written on underwater photography for magazines and presented on the subject at every Go Diving show since the event began. Their workshops and online courses in photography and photo editing attract students from around the world. Alphamarine’s expertise ranges from getting the best from budget-friendly cameras such as Olympus TG’s to using the latest high-end mirrorless options, and experience as retailers gives them a broader knowledge base than many underwater photographers when it comes to the equipment available.

Anne and Phil Medcalf

Marsa Shagra village has a range of accommodation from tents to air-conditioned chalets. A standard package will include full board, most soft drinks, and five days of unlimited house reef diving. Meals are buffet style, with a good range, and the meal times are long enough to allow for early morning dives and night dives without any risk of missing out. The house reef diving is excellent, and you can dive unguided from 6 am to 8 pm. As well as accessing the house reef from shore, zodiac dives on the outer house reef are covered in the unlimited package. Marine life is impressively varied, with regular sightings of turtles, reef sharks, and dolphins, as well as a great deal of macro life to find and occasional sightings of whale sharks. Elphinstone reef can be dived by speedboat with a journey time of about 20 minutes for a supplementary charge, as can a range of other local sites by boat or shore.

The way bookings are handled for this event is that you book your holiday package through Oonasdivers (oonasdivers.com) if you are in the UK (contact Red Sea Diving Safari for their agents elsewhere), and once you’re booked, you pay the workshop fee of £175 to Alphamarine Photography. The format and the resort setup suit people coming on their own, as a couple, or a group. If you have non-photographers with you, they don’t pay the workshop fee. Red Sea Diving Safari’s website is https://www.redsea-divingsafari.com For more details about what the workshop entails, to book spaces, or anything else, email info@alphamarinephoto.com.