Port Jackson Shark

Blogged by Simon on July 20, 2009 12:40pm | Last updated by Simon on March 22, 2010 10:42pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Port Jackson Shark (Heterodontus Portusjacksoni)Port Jackson Sharks (Heterodontus portusjacksoni) are great to photograph, mainly because they like to sit in one place and aren’t easily intimidated. I found this male animal at 22m depth at the Gap, on the same dive as in the previous post. At 14mm focal length you literally have to get into the animals face with the wide angle dome port, so I limited myself to 3-4 photos to not overly disturb it.

The original photo, exposed at f5/6 for 1/60s, had some green tones that were hard to get rid of, even with level adjustments. I don’t regularly take photos as deep as 22m, so this might be just lack of experience on my behalf, plus setting the flash to -2EV wasn’t the best idea here – the raw photo simply did not contain enough color information. I ended up using the colorize filter effect in Color Efex Pro, an Aperture plugin, to save the photo. I added red with a low opacity of 20%, then desaturating that tone to a degree where the sand reminded me of sand again, and bringing the red hue over to yellow slowly in Aperture until I ended up with the image you see. The background was burned on purpose. Lots of post processing on this one, maybe a little overworked.

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