Staghorn Coral Against Surface

Blogged by Simon on December 15, 2009 9:48am | Last updated by Simon on March 02, 2010 8:06pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Staghorn Coral Against SurfaceIt’s been a month since we’re back from Wakatobi and I have finally sighted much of the raw material. It may sound like the bleeding obvious, but one thing I learned on this trip is that most of the good shots have been taken in 8m or shallower. Towards the end of the second week i stopped bothering going deeper than 10m if not absolutely necessary.

This Staghorn Coral (Acropora sp.) is another photo taken at safety stop depth, where the surface texture of the water tends to turn out best. As with all photos like these I needed several attempts to just hide the sunball behind the subject and adjust exposure settings to f/22, 1/60s until the light rays worked out in a pleasing manner. 1/60s is probably too slow and is a result of having the camera constantly in Aperture prio mode, then not metering against the surface but the coral underneath.

The photo was converted into black&white in Silver Efex Pro for Aperture and underexposed -1EV in the process which works well here because of it’s strong contrast. Sometimes I feel sorry for shots being converted into black&white, this time I definitely didn’t.

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