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As many of you know, I was a cinematographer and a gaffer for several years before moving into professional photography. Movie lights draw an extremely high current (measured in Amps) due to their size and light output—and electrocution is a very real concern. As a result, my team and I have been through rigorous electrical-safety training throughout the years. We also teach electrical safety at our PhotoKamp workshops.

To be clear, there is always a risk when mixing electricity and water . It doesn’t have to be a water concept, it could simply start raining on your outdoor shoot. You can see in our setup that we had a single light “in” the pool. The other lights were safely placed (and heavily sand-bagged) on dry land. The light that I brought into the pool was on a sturdy C-stand, ratcheted down tightly, with about 120 lbs. of sandbags on it, both on the base and higher to distribute the weight evenly. The feeder cable was then looped around the stand arm and run up through the frame of the overhead silk, then dropped down to the ballast on dry land, well away from the water. The 1200w/s Profoto ballast was then plugged into a surge protector, which was itself plugged into a pool-safe GFCI outlet (the same ones used for underwater pool lighting fixtures). You can read more about ground-fault interrupters around swimming pools here: http://blog.poolcenter.com/article.aspx?articleid=6065 On top of these multiple layers of protection, you’ll notice we kept slack on the cable (some may have wondered why we didn’t pull it tighter). This prevents cable tension and decreases the risk of the light being knocked over should someone bump into it. We also have this area roped off and continuously manned to minimize human error.

My team and I take electrical safety extremely seriously, and you should never take a chance until you’ve been trained by an expert. Any misjudgments are most certainly errors that you only get to make once. Safety above all else!