Blue Groper

Blogged by Simon on February 09, 2009 11:53pm | Last updated by Simon on April 19, 2010 11:28am | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Blue Groper (Achoerodus viridis)It’s been a while since I bought the excellent Tokina 11-16mm wide angle lens that i have used a fair bit topside in the past year. On Sunday there was finally an opportunity to take it diving, so I assembled camera, housing, dome port and off we went to Shelly Beach, outside North Head. If it’s one thing you can count on in Sydney at Shelly Beach (or Maroubra), it’s Blue Gropers (Achoerodus viridis) (juvenile and female animals are yellow). They are so well domesticated and will follow you around as you dive, hoping for food. We didn’t bring any but that didn’t stop them from chasing us and leaving me with a few good photo opportunities.

Conditions weren’t too good with current, lots of suspended particles and the resulting bad visibility, so despite getting very close and mucking around with the flash in various positions I kept getting backscatter. I would need to fix this one in post processing. Once back on land, the first step was to recover some blown out highlights in Aperture, then adjust levels for better colors as the original shot was all dirty greens and yellows. The backscatter was not going to go away easily though, so I motion blurred the entire background to match the trajectory of the fish moving and removed the rest of the spots manually in both Aperture and Photoshop CS4. With motion blurring, you also need to blur the edges of your subject, otherwise I find it looks like a cut-out cardboard box glued onto the background. I also used dodge&burn to add depth to the subject by slightly burning the darker parts with 5% opacity, a tip I have from Douzy. By now I had changed the image so much, I threw all my original intentions of just doing de-backscatter overboard.

I blurred some of the background further and repainted the upper parts with a brush for dramatic effect. The result definitely doesn’t look like my original photo anymore, but I like what it does to the subject. I have to admit I am usually not a friend of too much editing, but on this photo I even manually used a brush on larger parts of the eye to remove dirt and basically repaint it as I found necessary. Fish eye surgery…eww ;)

The picture was taken at f/13 for 1/160s and ISO 400 in manual camera mode. I used twin TTL flash with front sync (-1EV). The Tokina lens was at it’s widest 11mm inside the dome port, which worked ok but requires very short subject distance, so i’m probably going to try the 16mm end next time.

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