Safety Stop

Blogged by Simon on April 27, 2010 8:00am | Last updated by Simon on April 19, 2010 3:53pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Safety StopWhat do you do with the three minutes at 5m? Good question. Well you can practice your hover for example if you’re in blue water, or you can try aiming a wide-angle lens at Comb Jellyfish (Ctenophora) in passing.

Here I actually tried in 9 point manual focus mode. For the less photographically inclined, this means I have to operate the left and right arrow buttons on the housing while looking through the viewfinder and hovering at the same time, trying to hit the subject that is drifting by with your focus point. It’s a bit like a video game, just while floating in space. Needless to say I failed and had to switch to matrix mode before this photo, where the camera does this automatically.

The sunball exposure is always tricky, so it’s good to practice these here and there while there’s nothing to shoot. For this one, I dialed f/8 and 1/500s after blowing out the previous exposures at 1/250s and 1/320s. Colors are awesome just underneath the surface, and you can really use the extra light for different kinds of photos than below 10m. Kind of a weird, different type shot, but I liked it.

Camera settings: Nikon D300, Tokina 10-17mm, f/8 for 1/500, ISO 200. Post processing includes Aperture’s recovery slider, level adjustments, definition to bring out the sun rays.

Tags: , , , , ,

Comment using Facebook

Not on Facebook?

Sign in using Google | Twitter | Yahoo

or:

Fill in all fields below and press submit