Wide Angle Underwater

PHXAZCRAIG wrote:

Mostly I'm not that good at wide angle, but just in this thread I've learned something - my 16mm shots turn out to be more interesting than my 35mm. Then too, an awful lot of my 35mm shots are frustrated 50 and 60mm shots. I'm going to explore the wide end more, and basically start by having at least one element close to the camera.

the first two rules for UW composition is get closer and shoot up.   When you're at the far end of the range, you're off on one.   If you don't have a choice (shark won't come closer), it is what it is, but when you're on a fixed WA, you 'zoom with your fins.'    Lighting has more potential, and the composition isn't as flat, feels more imersive.

White balance is an issue if I try to use my strobes. This last trip in Roatan I got much

If you're within 5ft of the foreground subject, the strobes should light enough that you can use it for the WB, the background should work itself out.  At an extreme, you can mask the foreground and then fiddle with the background.

Once I went to ambient, my ISO settings quickly became an issue - how high is too high? For the way I shoot and post-process, going up to 800 is a real struggle. I lose so much dynamic range that I can't make the shot come out the way I want.

If you're ultimately going to print, you have a lot more range than you need, but yeah, I understand the dilemma for TV/monitor displayed content.     But you can/should do some A/B experiments where you shoot the same dive with a mix of 800 and 200 and compare the results you can get in post.

I then practiced setting lower limits, but if my upper limit is only 200, I underexpose too much. Going below 1/160th is generally going to give me blurry fish and some corals, so I sometimes just plain run out of effective lighting.

I think this is where the high MPs starts to work against you.   With the MPs in the upper teens, I can shoot a lot at 1/100 and maybe even 1/80 if I can swim parallel to the subject.  Though this is a pain point for canons in how they handle A mode with or without auto ISO.  No way to enforce a minimum shutter speed.  Makes you want to go to shutter priority, but then A meanders.   Manual is too rigid.   Bit frustrating when doing a lot of depth changes.

One win, however, with your 45MP plus a wide fisheye - you don't really need to look at the viewfinder - you can just aim and shoot, and do a little bit of cropping to get the composition right.  Esp helpful for the shark dives.

I'm going to Socorro this weekend for 5 days of WA - we'll see what sort of tricks and jump settings I can come to.    Mantas present a challenge-  the all black ones have no sharp edges to focus on, and the mixed color ones tend to have fuzzy transitions between black and white.   The gills are great underneath.    Strobe power is a different problem that is common with sharks as well - if you're shooting the white underbelly, you probably want to be on the lower side, but shooting the top darker side, you do want the power to get that metallic sheen.