Cuttlefish

Blogged by Simon on February 03, 2009 6:18am | Last updated by Simon on March 21, 2010 9:33pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

CuttlefishOn Sunday, we went to dive Chowder Bay in Sydney Harbour for seahorses (story on that coming up), and amongst other things, found two small cuttlefish (Sepia sp.) hunting, or better stalking prey, which is what they reportedly do when holding up their top pair of tentacles. I decided to stalk them myself for a while and out came this shot of one on the hunt.

The picture itself was taken at f/16 for 1/125s, ISO 400, TTL twin flash with front sync with the new Nikon 60mm macro lens. I blurred the background in Photoshop to get rid of unwanted backscatter and then moved onto color conversion in Aperture. I really like the cuttlefish’s skin texture, so I tried converting it to black&white with SilverEfex Pro that I’m currently big on playing with (Silver Efex is an awesome piece of software). On this shot, I used an orange color filter to better define the skin texture and ended up burning most of the unwanted background gradually. Really, with this kind of subject, less is more. Also, yes, the black&white version is easily superior to the color shot, at least I think the larger b&w contrast works great. Also did additional work using dodge and burn inside Aperture, plus applying a soft blur around the edges of the subject, and voila. One of my personal favorites so far.

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