Why U/W Photo Always with Black Background?

I saw mostly all u/w photo is with black ground (cleaned background) and most prevalent on the winners of photo competition, what is main reason for this? Or just me feel something feel very unnatural when back ground is completely black?

Original photo (what I like stay true to the original) Vs. Cleaned back background like what most common u/w photo....

Blacken background

With Background

Hey!

Yeah, I'm certainly guilty of often wanting to create a cleaned black background to shoot against.

The reason is that a single colour background (in this case black) provides a neutral space to highlight the main subject. If you pick the background and subject carefully (luckily?) enough, they can compliment or contrast each other in a way that increases the effectiveness of the image. Anything which adds clutter or distraction is unhelpful - hence the clean-up.

Black, generally, is the simplest neutral space that can be created underwater. Other colours can be shades of blue - against the water column - and the orange/red of elephant ear corals.

Many photographers (me included) actually seek out the neutrality or simplicity of colour of the background before looking for subjects to shoot. So, wait for something interesting to swim or walk into the neutral space. Then clean up in post-shooting anything which intrudes.

Blue can be clean, too...

The exposure is a bit harder as you need a longer shutter speed and a wider aperture, but it makes a change from black.

Alternatively, you can use a wider aperture to throw the background out of focus:

Clear background do pleasing to the eyes. I just feel that majority photo in scuba mags now with black background it start getting annoying for me. Sometime in my opinion if photo too perfect means too much processing done, sometime I missed the film era where good photo is not determined by how much post processing done.

Tdpriest, nice photo. I love the goby macro shoot.....

Hi

Yeah, can appreciate you might feel annoyed by the number of black background shots.

But, in its defence, black/single colour backgrounds are not really a product of real post-processing. The aim is to achieve that effect through use of shutter/aperture combinations as Tim explains. Post-proceessing should usually be only necessary for, say, getting rid of the odd distracting spot of e.g. suspended sediment. The whole aim is to find the background which will create that neutral background space - as you can see in Tim's two (really nice) pics. I doubt Tim did a whole lot of post-processing to get the result: it was about choosing the right angle and background. The whip coral goby shot is the perfect example. There is nothing at all in the background and Tim could use a shutter/aperture combination to come up with the blue he chose.

But, yes, it can make photos all a bit same-same. No doubt someone will come along with a new style before too long and we'll all move on.....