Deep darkness: filming underwater at night with the Canon ME20F-SH and EOS R5

DoP Peter Zuccarini was just 12 when he started taking photographs underwater. Growing up in Key Biscayne, Florida, he spent his childhood exploring the island's beaches and learned to free dive to catch lobsters when he was 11.

"I'd decided I didn't want to just pull things out of the sea and thought photography was a good alternative," he explains. "I saved all my money from odd jobs and bought an underwater camera, housing and scuba gear and started shooting at a very young age."

It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for documenting marine life. After graduating from Brown University, Peter worked as a staff videographer at a shark research lab. After specialising in filming sharks for several years, he'd made contacts in the wildlife filmmaking world and moved into more general underwater wildlife work, then into the motion picture industry.

Peter has since become one of the world's most sought-after underwater specialists, with a string of Hollywood blockbusters to his name, including Life of Pi, Jurassic World, Venom, the Pirates of the Caribbean series and the upcoming Avatar sequels.

When the Covid-19 pandemic put Peter's busy shooting schedule on pause, he went home to Key Biscayne, where he had the opportunity to return to his roots, filming the sea life on his doorstep. Here, he shares how the Canon ME20F-SH video camera enabled him to document rare coral spawning in almost total darkness, and how the Canon EOS R5's compact size has revolutionised underwater videography for him.

"That was a very successful way to introduce coral back into the sea and encourage more growth out on these reef sites," says Peter. "The challenge was that the coral are so sensitive to light, the team wanted to work in the dark, with very little extra light."

Peter turned to a camera he'd used before, the Canon ME20F-SH, which is built for low-light videography. With an ultra-high sensitivity 35mm Full Frame CMOS sensor, the ME20F-SH can shoot Full HD video in light levels less than 0.0005 lux at the maximum 75dB gain setting, which is the equivalent of 4.5 million ISO.

Peter shot test footage of the iguanas in his pool at night using the ME20F-SH in underwater housing. "The sensitivity was so great that I could work with it with no light, really, just the light in the sky," he says. "I was dialling back from the super digital gain that can see in virtually total darkness, to see what happens if I add just one handheld torch light or a proper underwater movie light. I wanted to learn what I could do with the camera in the different intensities of light. I worked through all that in my pool."

Filming in near darkness, with just the smallest of lights, the ME20F-SH came into its own. With larger pixel sizes, its 2.26MP sensor maximises light-gathering capabilities to deliver ultra-low-light images with low noise.

"We shot at the equivalent of ISO 80,000, maybe even one stop faster, and the footage was fantastic," says Peter. "It was so clean. When you hear of a camera which 'sees in the dark', you picture those grainy monochrome wildlife films of lions. But the ME20F-SH footage has colour." Many people who viewed his footage didn't realise how difficult the shooting conditions had been, he says. "You can really see what the scientists were doing. It looks like a normal image, but it's just done with incredibly low amounts of light."

The footage Peter captured is being used to get the local community involved with coral restoration. "Everybody who lives in a place like South Florida knows how valuable coral is to the local wildlife and environment. The university is using this to show what can be done to save the coral."

Throughout his career, Peter has shot on a range of Canon cameras, from the EOS 5D Mark II (now succeeded by the EOS 5D Mark IV) through to the EOS-1D C (now succeeded by the EOS-1D X Mark III) and the Canon EOS R. "As I've moved from Canon camera to Canon camera, I've always felt that the sensors have an incredible range of colour available," he enthuses. "The sensors are so colour sensitive."

Most recently, Peter has seen this in action on the Canon EOS R5. "To me as a motion picture person, the EOS R5 felt like the next iteration of the EOS 5D Mark II," he says. "When that came out, DoPs for motion pictures really jumped on it because of its small size. It filled that need for a small camera that you could easily mount onto something or use when running down a line to capture action.

"It had been a while since I had used small form factor cameras, until the EOS R5 came along with 8K RAW video capture. To be able to squeeze that much resolution and dynamic range into such a small object is an incredibly useful tool for me. The size of a Canon DSLR in an underwater housing is also great for shooting while freediving. Diving without scuba gear with a small but powerful camera allows for rapid ascent and repositioning to compose fleeting moments with animals."

During a recent job for an NGO conducting a survey of plastics on ocean floors, Peter came across a family of manatees eating seagrass. "I didn't want to disturb them – I didn't even want them to know I was there," he says. "With the EOS R5 I could easily sneak around them and used this tiny camera to get incredible 8K images of them grazing. The colour is just really beautiful."

For Peter the underwater world holds a kind of magic, encapsulated by the unique spectrum of colour and light. "If you've grown up learning about the world through your relationship with water or spent a lot of time in the water, it's something that gets into you that is very difficult to describe in words," he says. "It's the colour palette, that everything is super saturated in greens and blues, and the way that light comes out of the dark."