Red Bass Portrait

Blogged by Simon on January 17, 2009 5:52am | Last updated by Simon on April 19, 2010 11:14am | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Red Bass Portrait (Lutjanus Bohar)So far, I haven’t gotten lucky enough to be able do fish portrait with my new gear very often. Usually, I am either in the wrong place, they are too far away, too shy, or I have the wrong lens on. That was different with the Red Bass (Lutjanus bohar) at the Cod Hole, Ribbon Reefs. With someone else doing the feeding, I could focus on taking shots and the fish weren’t going anywhere, so I had a chance to work on some close ups.

I fired away at the hungry Red Bass (Lutjanus bohar) in passing, but this proved harder than I thought at first. The 105mm macro lens makes it difficult to get close to the subject because of it’s relatively narrow field of view, which is further cut off by my smaller DX sensor. I ended up being well over 1m away to be able to fit a decent amount of the subject into the frame. (I think I might need a 60mm macro lens for larger subjects, which has a wider angle of view). The only counter measure I could come up with at this distance was to crank up the flash a fair bit to reclaim some of the lost color, and exposure wise hope for the best.

Once downloaded onto the Mac, I fixed blown out highlights in Aperture with the recovery slider, which also helped bring out the texture of the fish scales and gills nicely. I also adjusted for a warmer color temp and reduced the ISO 800 crawlies with Noise Ninja. Exposed at f/16 for 1/125s in manual mode. Getting this shot right was the result of a lot of luck and a fair amount of post processing.

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