A6000, what else do I need to start?

DigiPainter wrote:

Barmaglot_07 wrote:

I've never used a filter (besides a yellow one for fluorescence); RAW is a better solution for most situations.

Lastly can the visibility be corrected in lightroom to get more clear shots of the subject? Obviously being as close as possible is best, but is it possible to get rid of the haze etc?

You can actually do quite a bit to make things look clearer, but there are costs.   I like to use the Lightroom Black slider, pulling the shadows down until the histogram almost touches the left side.  That darkens the whole scene, so I then often need to add some exposure.  THAT affects the highlights, so I then have to reduce them a bit to avoid clipping.  Done with care, you can definitely make a lot of the haze mostly disappear.  Examples below.

It can help some, but there is no substitute for getting close.

Agreed, though you can't do much about it when shooting wide.

So say I shoot something underwater and it turns out all blue, like a school of big predator fish, if I shoot in raw I can bring some colour back to the fish?

Yes, but...   You need enough light, and again, you need to be 'close enough'.

For instance, I shoot strobes with manual power settings, often 1 step down from full power, with apertures like F10-16 and ISO 64.   So no power left for a fish that swims by 10-20 feet away.

I can take the shot, and I can crop in a lot (I have 45mp to work with now), but it will be underexposed, and it will likely have significant haze.   I can only bump up the exposure so much, and if it's not too badly underexposed, it can look fine.  I then often have to use massive amounts of contrast to get definition, plus try to reduce the haze.

So essentially you have 2 setups, flat port for shooting clioseups/macro
Bulb port for shooting wide angles and fish eye?

That's my dilemma.  A single prime for mostly macro.  (Actually mostly close-up.  I rarely am close enough to achieve 1:1 macro).   Shot through a flat port.

And a wide zoom, shot behind a big dome port.

I've tried splitting the difference, using a short zoom (60mm in my case, down from my usual 105mm).  The idea was that I could get a shot of a whole larger fish, or most of a diver, while still being able to do macro.   Problem was, the working distance of the 60mm was so short as to be unusable for me.

I also tried adding a 1.4 teleconverter to my 105mm macro prime, and I wasn't happy with the sharpness.

So basically it's shoot with a 105mm and do a lot of cropping.  Shooting anything not macro with the 105mm generally has it far away enough that I have significant haze and under exposure to process.

Here is my 'clear it up with black slider example'.   I also used the eyedropper tool to set white balance on some metal bit in the dive gear.   (I do not find it that hard to get a decent white balance.   There is a LOT of 'pure' white underwater, in coral or shells.  Or black (sometimes a fish eye).  Or black, white or metal bits in dive gear.

Out of camera:

Processed with white balance and use of black slider:

Haze looked more like the first image in reality.    (St Thomas...)    You can see it's easy to block up the shadows and lose detail in the dark parts of the dive gear.