Yen-Yi Lee (Facebook: Yen-Yi Lee), known to everyone as "Little Brother Lee," is an underwater photographer with a passion for diving and the shutter. Since 2010 he has won a string of major underwater photography awards, including First Place at the China Underwater Photography Competition, Gold Medal at ADEX 2015, First Place at the Raja Ampat Underwater Photography Competition (2017), First Place and Gold Medal at the Asian dive expos DRT 2012 and 2013, Gold Medal at China Ocean Voice (ADEX 2017), Gold Medal at the Malaysia International Dive Expo (MIDE 2017), Gold Medal at the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology Underwater Photography Competition (2017), Gold Medal at the US dive expo (2016), and Gold Medal at the world's largest underwater photography forum (Wetpixel Deep Indonesia 2016). His goal is to use his lens to show the world the beauty of the ocean. The Editor is delighted to have had the chance to sit down with Little Brother Lee and have him share his thoughts on underwater photography!
Xiaoliuqiu's distinctive cage aquaculture
A distinctive split-level shot
Seeing marine life from a different angle — macro
If you love it, don't hurt it
Yen-Yi Lee
the Editor: How did you first get into underwater photography?
Yen-Yi Lee: I still remember it clearly — it was 2010, during a snorkeling outing in Kenting. Along the way I discovered how beautiful the underwater world was, offering a perspective and a sense of wonder completely unlike anything on land. I signed up for a dive course on the spot, and my underwater photography journey began. In those first 30 scuba tanks or so, I was shooting everywhere with a Sony action camera, photographing anything I saw. When I found that its resolution and image quality couldn't satisfy me, I started learning to take a DSLR underwater.
Raja Ampat mangroves
the Editor: As camera costs have fallen in recent years, more and more people have taken up underwater photography and information has become increasingly abundant. Information must have been relatively scarce seven years ago — how did you go about building your skills back then?
Yen-Yi Lee: Before getting into underwater photography I was already shooting on land, so I had a solid grasp of camera settings — the relationship between ISO, aperture, and shutter speed — and I understood my camera's limits and color rendering. That gave me a faster learning curve than most. Even so, information really was scarce back then, so I went and bought several English-language underwater photography books and dived into them deeply, gradually picking up techniques that way. Beyond shooting technique, I actually think the aesthetics elective I took as a university general-education course helped me enormously — it made a very noticeable difference to my wide-angle work later on. To this day I consider it the single most useful course I took in four years of university (laughs).
Recommended reading: The Underwater Photographer
Recommended reading: Underwater Photography Masterclass
the Editor: You have experience with both topside and underwater photography. How do you see the differences between the two, and which do you find more difficult?
Yen-Yi Lee: Whether on land or underwater, producing truly distinctive and creative photographs takes a great deal of experience and thought — neither is easy. That said, I believe underwater photography presents more challenges, as follows:
- Natural conditions: Sometimes the surface is calm with bright sunshine, yet underwater the visibility is murky and the current is ripping. More variables come into play, and they directly affect how many shots you actually get.
- The medium: Air is an excellent medium, but seawater is not — it absorbs sharpness and color saturation. And that's before we even factor in the effects of increasing distance or suspended particles, all of which directly affect the quality of a shot.
- Your own diving skills: How well you control your neutral buoyancy and manage your air consumption will affect both the time you have and the angles you can achieve on every dive.
- Equipment: Underwater camera gear requires an underwater housing, making everything bulky and heavy. High-end camera systems also face lens port compatibility issues, forcing you to decide before each dive whether you're shooting wide-angle or macro. Light transmission underwater is poor, which turns lighting into a discipline of its own — choosing between continuous lights and strobes, and knowing where and how to position them, are often the deciding factors in whether a shot works.
Underwater is a three-dimensional space — it adds an entire extra dimension compared with topside shooting, which means the photographer has far more compositional possibilities to explore. The same dive site shot at different depths yields completely different moods, and that tests every photographer's sensitivity to composition. My advice is to shoot on land as often as you can: it helps you know your camera inside out, and it helps you develop that all-important "photographer's eye" — the ability to find a composition that's uniquely yours.
Patient waiting and a little luck
the Editor: Your work spans both macro and wide-angle. What feeling or insight does each style bring you?
Yen-Yi Lee: I much prefer wide-angle shooting, because each image differs so much from the last, and the compositional possibilities are endlessly varied. I also happen to dislike hovering in one spot shooting macro after macro — I enjoy roaming around and photographing as I go, savoring the whole diving experience. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, though, macro is easier than wide-angle when it comes to producing a strong image, because the simplicity of the concept keeps the subject clear and prominent. Wide-angle takes in so much more of the scene, making it harder to make your subject stand out, which is exactly why composition becomes so much more critical.
the Editor: Looking back over your years of shooting, which photograph are you most proud of? And how do you feel your photography has changed over time?
Yen-Yi Lee: That's actually a very hard question to answer, because your mindset is different at every stage, and every period has its own representative image. When you first start diving, you grab the camera and shoot absolutely everything you see. As experience builds, you become more selective — you recognize when a composition isn't going to work and you let it go, moving on to look for something different. The way you shoot shifts with every phase of growth. That's why I believe there's no such thing as a photographer's single best photograph. The one clear change I can point to is that I press the shutter far less often than I used to, because I've gradually developed the ability to be selective. These days I can find a keeper within 20 to 50 frames.
the Editor: You've won countless awards over the years. What mindset do you bring to your shooting, and how do you view underwater photography competitions?
Yen-Yi Lee: In the beginning you want to photograph every creature you see. As experience accumulates, you start wanting recognition, and you begin entering competitions. But at a later stage, you find yourself returning to the original reason you started diving in the first place — simply enjoying the dive and freezing moments with your shutter. Every dive brings different people to meet and different marine life to encounter. I genuinely enjoy that process now. Winning an award is great, of course, but what I really want is for diving to enrich my life experiences. Underwater photography competitions are a wonderful medium — they help more people appreciate the beauty of the ocean, and by viewing competition entries we can learn new shooting techniques to apply to our own future work.
A great composition is often a matter of chance
the Editor: When you're shooting, do you zero in on a particular subject with the composition already worked out in your head, or is every shoot a matter of patient waiting combined with a little luck?
Yen-Yi Lee: If I'm going after a specific subject, I always draw up a shooting plan in advance — but the plan rarely matches what actually happens on site, and that's when the ability to think on your feet becomes crucial. Say you want a shark to swim toward a wreck so you can capture the image you had in mind, but the shark just won't cooperate. You have to adapt — rethink the composition, reposition the strobe, adjust your camera settings — and the better you know your camera, the faster and more effectively you can do that in the moment. I lean toward wide-angle, and I seldom wait longer than 30 minutes for a specific shot, because I prefer to keep moving and searching for new compositions.
the Editor: As a Taiwanese diver who has shot in many countries, could you recommend some dive sites or subjects in Taiwan that you think are particularly well suited to underwater photography, and explain why? Do you think Taiwan has a chance of becoming a must-visit destination for serious underwater photographers? And what would you suggest to relevant authorities to help improve the current situation?
Yen-Yi Lee: Let me answer the second part first — I think it's very difficult! Southeast Asia simply offers too much in terms of service quality and ecological richness; for Taiwan to develop on that level in the short term would be extremely challenging. But perhaps Taiwan can start by identifying its own distinctive strengths and then gradually build the surrounding industry around them, so that entire regions benefit from dive tourism. The Philippines' Malapascua and Indonesia's Raja Ampat are great examples: local governments collect dive fees and use the revenue to subsidize residents or fund environmental conservation, giving locals a higher income than fishing ever could and creating a win-win-win outcome. In Taiwan, the Northeast Coast at 82-5k is excellent for macro; Xiaoliuqiu's rich sea turtle population could attract visitors from Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland China; and the wreck at Badai Bay in Orchid Island is genuinely worth promoting loudly. Most importantly, though, Taiwan's dive-related services are still lacking — if first-time visiting divers leave with a bad impression, that's the bigger problem we need to think through carefully. There is one stretch of water in Taiwan that I'm extremely curious about: Itu Aba Island in the South China Sea. It's so rarely visited that the marine ecosystem must be incredibly rich. The key, ultimately, is finding what makes Taiwan different.
Encountering marine life is one of the great joys of underwater photography
the Editor: In all your travels shooting across many countries, were there any experiences that stood out as particularly special — whether because of the journey itself, the sheer thrill of the subject, or anything else that happened along the way?
Yen-Yi Lee: Once I was heading to Australia to photograph Minke whales — I had a liveaboard booked out of Cairns — but the airline delayed my luggage and I missed the boat's departure, so the entire trip had to be cancelled. Another time I went to Rhode Island near New York to photograph blue sharks. The first day we bobbed around on the boat for seven or eight hours and saw them for just fifteen minutes. The second day was cancelled due to rough seas. On the third day, with the swell still heavy, they pushed ahead anyway — and after another seven or eight hours on the water we came back empty-handed. The kicker: no refund for the cancelled day. Then there was a trip to Sri Lanka to photograph whales. For the first five days we could only spot them blowing in the far distance. On the sixth day, out of nowhere, we were right in the middle of more than a hundred whales spouting all around us. Had we only booked five days, none of that would have happened. But that's the joy of diving — wouldn't you say?
the Editor: They say diving will drain your wallet for life, and underwater photography will bankrupt three generations. What advice and insights would you share with newcomers who want to get into underwater photography, so they can avoid making costly mistakes?
Yen-Yi Lee: It really comes down to how passionate you are about underwater photography. Shooting photos simply cannot make you money these days — ten-odd years ago, underwater images could sell for a decent price, but the market now makes it virtually impossible to recoup your investment. If you've decided to commit to underwater photography, go straight for the top of your budget, because the cost of upgrading later is even higher. Beyond that, think about what you want from your images: if you just want to share online, a compact camera is perfectly fine; if you need large-format prints for an exhibition, you'll need to consider investing in a larger system. Everyone assigns different value to the same thing — some people in Southeast Asia are genuinely astonished that I could buy a house there with what I spent on a single camera — but as long as what you do brings you satisfaction, that's more than enough.
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