Alpine newt (female). Picardie, France.

Search for an underwater photo of a newt, and you will find beautiful images of… newts in aquaria. So, last month I set out to fix this and went on a little expedition to the north of France to make a unique underwater photo series of newts in their natural environment.

One reason there are few underwater photos of newts may be that few people are crazy enough to jump into a cattle drinking pool. Another, as I soon found, is that it’s no easy task to make them. The little creatures vary from about ten to fifteen centimeters in size and the visibility in these pools drops to zero with the least movement, so you need to get very close to retain any kind of color and detail in your images. Like most wildlife, newts are not particularly keen on posing, so this proved to be a bit of a challenge!

This would be me photographing a newt. Also, I'm providing entertainment to the local cows. Photo by Jacques van Alphen.

I’ll explain a little bit about how these photos came together. After an initial test shoot I was planning to bring in an underwater strobe. Firstly, to have control over the quality of the light, and secondly to get away with a smaller aperture. Having the camera almost touching your subject leaves you with very little depth of field to work with at larger apertures. The plan was for my friend Jeremy Upsal to enter the water with me in waders and control the strobe. That didn’t prove to be very successful. Every careful little step sent an avalanche of sediment up from the bottom and it wasn’t long before we were engulfed in a big cloud of mud. On to plan B: out with creative lighting and in with high ISO.

Smooth newt (female). Picardie, France.

Crested newt (male). Picardie, France.

All in all we encountered three species in this one pool, which is quite exceptional these days: the most common species in Europe, the smooth newt (Lissotriton vulgaris; I’ve blogged about it twice before), as well as the alpine newt (Ichthyosaura alpestris) and the crested newt (listed as vulnerable in the Netherlands).

Finding this kind of diversity in a single pool is becoming a little rare because, well, newt habitat is becoming a little rare. For reproduction, newts need clear water with rooted plants. They stick their eggs onto the plants and once hatched the larvae use them to seek shelter from predators. Larger bodies of water are usually inhabited by fish that eat the eggs and larvae, while small pools may dry up during summer, or turn into grassland as they become clogged up with organic matter. So really what they need is a network of small pools within walking distance of each other (around 100 meters). After the reproductive season the adults leave the water to overwinter on land. For this reason, they also need some nearby bushy area, such as a hedge or a forest edge, where they can crawl away until spring comes.

This may seem like a lot, but actually all they need is for you and some of your neighbors to have a pond in the backyard, and take out the goldfish .

Crested newt (female). Picardie, France.

Crested newt. Picardie, France.

Smooth newt (male). Picardie, France.

Alpine newts (male on the left, female swimming up for air). Picardie, France.

Crested newt (male). Picardie, France.

So there we go, unique photos of wildlife, and with some luck you could get similar results in the backyard! I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into the underwater world of the newt; let me know in the comments!