Entering The Water

Blogged by Simon on July 26, 2009 1:05pm | Last updated by Simon on April 19, 2010 11:33am | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Entering The WaterToday, I wasn’t diving for a change, but staying out of the water aboard Hoochie Mumma. The boat picked us up at Chowder Bay, and took us out of the harbour, down towards Maroubra, whale watching. July/August is whale season in Sydney – these large marine mammals pass us by as they migrate from the Antarctic towards tropical waters, where they give birth. We got lucky with a few humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) sightings, however when it came to photographing the animal breaching the water (which one of them did), I missed it by a split second!

Once the whales got bored of us, the boat moved on to Magic Point to dive with the Grey Nurse Sharks and I decided to turn my attention to the divers aboard. Water always looks great when shot with fast shutter times, so I aimed at everyone when they did their giant stride entries to see what happens. The photo is shot with the rather bulky Nikon 80-400mm lens, which I can’t take under water, but was there to serve for whale closeups. It is set to 80mm, exposed for 1/400s at f/5.6. This is just fast enough to freeze the water drops in mid air.

The color version had the typical dark green surface color of temperate seas, which looks a bit dull. To improve this, I decided to turn it into black&white at the computer and gave it some treatment to adjust levels and enhance contrast, focussing just on light and shadow which works great for this image.

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