Schooling Baitfish

Blogged by Simon on July 12, 2010 8:00am | Last updated by Simon on August 14, 2010 5:49am | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Schooling BaitfishI was out of the water already after the dive at Palm Island, when Matt spotted this ball of baitfish (Atherinomorus sp.) from the boat. Lucky me started the dive with 270bar of air (can you say burst disk?) so I had some left and went back there to find them in the hundreds presumably hiding from something bigger. It was too shallow to get underneath, so I tried composing a few images against the reef and surface reflections. I left the flash on, but probably could have gone without it here, shooting comfortably at f/13, which is too narrow for wide-angle typically, but just under the surface you need small apertures to fight overexposure from the ever-present sun rays.

The school was very nervous, darting in all directions which doesn’t make them easier to photograph but gave me good formations like these. To get this photo, I just hovered between them with my eye glued to the viewfinder and shot in rapid succession. I left the Nikon D300 in aperture priority mode, which gave me 1/160s shutter time in this light. This will typically stop any motion under water but not the nervous baitfish as you can see they still are a little blurry around the edge. I should really have gone for manual and 1/320 or 1/500s for this photo, but was too caught up in the action to notice.

Other camera settings: Nikon D300, Tokina 10-17mm wide-angle, f/13, 160s, ISO 200. Post processed for the usual suspects: level adjustments in Aperture, definition to bring out the surface reflections and saturation for the colors. I left color temperature unchanged, so yes it really was that green just underneath the surface on the day.

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  1. Martin Mehall
    on July 19th, 2010
    1

    Simon, my son and I were on our open water dive cert with you in June on this trip. i was wondering if you still have that photo from all of us on the front of the boat?

  2. Simon
    on July 19th, 2010
    2

    Hi Martin, yes that was a good dive day, Matt has the photos up on facebook: http://bit.ly/9AhNyr

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