Ctenophora

Blogged by Simon on February 25, 2010 4:03pm | Last updated by Simon on February 27, 2010 6:55pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

CtenophoraToday for something entirely different. When coming back up from a dive at Long Reef, Manly, this Comb Jellyfish (Ctenophora) was drifting right in front of my mask. I am a huge fan of jellies and don’t have nearly as many photos of them as I would like. You can’t but love the reflections they create when you point a flash at them, sometimes even without that already. Turns out it was rather hard to focus on something this transparent with the camera autofocus hunting noisily for something to hold on to. I’m glad I had my focus light with me which I was able to quickly turn on before losing sight of the jelly (and that is very easy thing to do).

The original image was rather flatly lit, so I used the contrast slider on this shot a fair amount. The background is blurred in Photoshop for better bokeh and to avoid focussing the eyes on the unfortunately present backscatter. I also used Color Efex Pro for Aperture to brighten the subject, while fading the bottom half of the image to near darkness, then applied saturation and level adjustments for the jellyfish to bring out the white / cyan tones. Fair amount of work, but worth it.

Camera settings: Nikon D300, Tokina 10-17mm, ISO 200, focal length 17mm, aperture f/10 for 1/125s in manual mode. Manual flash +1.3EV, subject distance about 1m

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