Gorgonian Fan in Fish Rock Cave

Blogged by Simon on October 05, 2008 11:23am | Last updated by Simon on April 19, 2010 11:02am | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Gorgonian Fan in Fish Rock CaveFish Rock Cave has a great gorgonian fan (Gorgoniidae) right at the exit. If you are about the leave the cave, you can find it about 5m before the blue water on the left hand side.

For this shot, I used the D300 with a 105mm macro lens and had to get pretty close up until about 50cm. Unfortunately there isn’t much to hold on to at the site so it was all hovering in midwater while maintaining enough distance to avoid damaging the coral. I took about 5-10 images with various flash settings at F11, until I settled for this one with about 20% flash strength. It is very difficult not to overexpose or hotspot the image at that distance so I had to turn down the flash accordingly and keep both flash arms wide away pointing inwards. The photo was shot in portrait mode as this was the only way I could get the camera close enough to the wall with the flash arms on both sides above and below.

I used Aperture for postprocessing and adjusted saturation about 20% to bring out the colors nicely, then rotated the picture to landscape which I like better on this shot. I also sharpened it to work against a slight blur that is probably due to me choosing the wrong shutter time (picture taken in aperture priority mode). I’m reasonably happy with the results but I need to improve my exposures. On most pictures from the South West Rocks trip I have motion blur for shutter speeds slower than 1/200s. Conditions in water were a bit bumpy but that isn’t really an excuse. I think I might start working on a cheat sheet with manual f-stop/shutter settings for each lens. Manual adjustment seems the way to go.

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