Stingray In The Dark

Blogged by Simon on March 18, 2010 8:14pm | Last updated by Irene on March 19, 2010 4:36pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

StingrayToday I’ve got another Stingray (Family: Dasyatidae) I’ve photographed a while back at Manly Rocks. Notoriously shy animals as they are, it was extremely difficult to get close to it (I don’t have the faintest idea how Steve Irvin managed to?). If you read this blog frequently, you may hear me saying ‘getting close’ here and there – it is one of the hardest things to do underwater. If you approach too fast, your subject is likely to bolt, if you’re too obvious it is going to figure it out and keep a careful distance. Oh yeah, and if you turn your head around in the direction you weren’t watching, there’s always plenty of fish swimming there right behind you!

On this dive, we followed a circular pattern and photographed the ray a second time around, after it escaped me the first time. I just waited there for about a minute before carefully approaching and got to try 3 shots, before it finally disappeared into the blue. When I saw the animal resting on the sand, I tried to compose this photo with the upper half as negative space and using the sand as a compositional aid to give depth to the image (similar to the Goby shot).

Camera settings: Nikon D300, Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens, ISO 200, f/11 for 1/100s. I converted this photo to black&white in Silver Efex Pro for Aperture with underexposure set to -1EV and level adjusted the results again in Aperture. Most of the black background is burned in post processing. Definition (or details) are bumped up 30% in Aperture to get better sand grain. The final result was then level adjusted for pure black and white.

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  1. Northamptonshire Wedding Photography
    on March 28th, 2010
    1

    I’ve never tried underwater photography, but I would like to.

    It seems like being an underwater paparazzi – finding your subject and photographing it before it runs away!

    :)

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