A small fish hovers outside its shelter. One photographer waits for it to feed, keeping enough of the surrounding reef in the frame to show what is happening. Another experiments with a slow shutter and flash, letting a trace of movement follow the fish. A third isolates its eye against a soft, dark background.
Which image is traditional, and which is creative?
The settings will not settle the question. A shallow depth of field is not automatically an artistic experiment. A sharp image at f/8 is not automatically documentary or scientific. Even a vignette tells us little about the photographer’s purpose. What matters is what the finished picture helps us see, what it asks us to believe, and how it was made.
Traditional does not mean plain
In underwater photography, a traditional approach often keeps the animal, its behaviour or its habitat readily recognisable. The photographer may be trying to show a feeding relationship, an encounter between species or the remarkable detail of a familiar subject. Careful timing, composition and light can make that photograph as visually arresting as any abstract image.
David Doubilet’s The Garden of Eels is a useful example. The garden eels withdrew when he arrived, so he set up a remote camera and waited for them to emerge undisturbed. The image earned the Under Water category award in Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Its power comes from an observed scene, patient fieldcraft and a frame that makes the relationships within it visible.
“Natural history” describes photographs concerned with living things and their world. “Documentary” describes an approach grounded in a truthful account of what happened. A single image can be both. Neither word demands a neutral background or even sharpness from front to back.
A scientific record has an additional purpose: it needs a reliably identified observation and useful context or data. A visually striking wildlife photograph may serve that purpose, but an aperture setting or a factual-looking style cannot confer scientific value by itself.
The strength of a traditional approach is that the viewer can understand the subject and its world. Its risk is stopping once the subject is identifiable. A rare animal in clear focus may be a valuable record; as a photograph, it may still need a moment, relationship or visual idea that makes a stranger pause.
Creative does not mean adding an effect
A more interpretive image may use unusual optics, selective light, reflection, deliberate camera movement or a long exposure. Such choices can reveal patterns and feelings that a more descriptive frame leaves unnoticed.
In Fractal Forest, Ross Gudgeon threaded an extended macro wide lens between the branches of a soft coral in Lembeh and lit it from behind. The resulting view resembles a tiny forest, yet it reveals the coral’s real structure. Wildlife Photographer of the Year highly commended it in Natural Artistry. Here, the creative choice is where and how to look.
Coloured lighting offers another route. In SeongCheol Cho’s Calm at the Heart of Turmoil, a shrimp sits inside a naturally spiralling whip coral; red and blue lights turn the scene into a vivid study of stillness and turbulence. It won the 2026 Underwater Photographer of the Year Macro category. The coloured light is Cho’s interpretation, while the shrimp and coral are real subjects he encountered.
For a more abstract example from above the water, Etienne Francey’s A Palette of Ducks uses a long exposure and deliberate camera movement to turn ducks reflected in a lake into streaks of colour. It was highly commended in Wildlife Photographer of the Year’s Natural Artistry category. The result looks less like a record of how the ducks appeared to an eye at that instant, yet it is made from the light of a real scene.
That is different from using a technique as a signature regardless of subject. Circular blur or swirling bokeh can be effective when it strengthens an image. When the effect becomes the first and last thing we notice, the animal may disappear behind a familiar formula. Novel equipment is not a substitute for an idea.
A creative interpretation can still be truthful. Bokeh renders points of light as shapes; a swirl changes the look of the background; coloured lighting changes the colours recorded; and a movement trail gathers moments of actual motion into one frame. None adds a second animal to the encounter, and none automatically makes the whole photograph a successful creative image. Repeating one animal to suggest a group is a different move: it invents a relationship. Such a picture would need to be presented openly as an artistic construction. Calling it a witnessed gathering would change the claim the image makes. Some competitions prohibit such constructions altogether, even when the source photographs are genuine.
The strength of a creative approach is its freedom to reveal an unexpected quality of the subject. Its risk is making the treatment more interesting than the encounter, or allowing the finished image to imply a false event.
What about a movement trail?
A slow shutter can record movement over a fraction of a second; a burst of flash can leave part of the subject crisp. With rear-curtain sync, the flash fires near the end of the exposure, placing a sharper moment after the trail. This is an expressive use of time, yet the movement may be entirely genuine.
Michael Patrick O’Neill’s Night Flight, a Wildlife Photographer of the Year Under Water winner, used shutter and flash settings to convey the movement of a flying fish. Songda Cai’s Blackwater Light Trails, also recognised in Under Water, used a slow shutter to show the trailing filaments of a juvenile fish in motion. These examples show how an image can be highly interpretive while remaining rooted in real behaviour.
Neither award page establishes a rule for every other competition. Nor does a visible trail tell us by itself whether an image belongs in a “traditional” or “creative” category. One judge may see an illuminating account of movement; another competition may reserve conspicuous motion effects for its creative division. The written brief, the complete image and the account of its making matter more than the name of the camera setting.
Categories are boundaries, not definitions of art
Photography terms overlap. A natural history image can be documentary and beautifully inventive. An abstract photograph can faithfully portray a real subject. “Traditional” and “Creative” are useful category names in some competitions, but their exact boundaries belong to each competition’s rules.
Wildlife Photographer of the Year, run by the Natural History Museum, has an Under Water category and a Natural Artistry category. Its rules permit some techniques that other contests exclude, and they reserve in-camera multiple exposures for Natural Artistry. An award elsewhere is an example of what photography can do, not a precedent that guarantees entry under a different set of rules.
When in doubt, examine the image’s central claim. Does it invite us to understand the animal or behaviour as encountered? Does it use an overt technique to offer an interpretation? Does the viewer know enough about the method to avoid mistaking an artistic construction for an observed event? Those questions are more useful than asking whether a dark background or a particular aperture makes something creative.
Try both approaches
A photographer does not have to settle on one visual language for every dive. An encounter may first invite a clear image of behaviour and habitat. If conditions and the animal’s welfare allow, it may also offer a distinct interpretation through light, viewpoint or movement. Make each photograph because it reveals something worth seeing, rather than to fill a category.
Later, compare the frames. Which one tells the story most clearly? Which one shows you something you had not noticed? Which one could you describe honestly without explaining away its appearance? Neither label answers the question in the title: the winning image depends on the photograph, the category brief and the judges.
Different images may belong in different competition categories when the rules allow it. Exploring both approaches gives a photographer more possibilities to learn from and more considered images to choose among. It offers no promise of an award. The most rewarding outcome may be discovering that a real encounter can support more than one truthful way of seeing it.