Wide Angle Underwater

kelpdiver wrote:

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.

I can't get close enough sometimes - but other times I just want more lens.   Here is an example, though it is an example of trying to use a wide angle lens for a macro subject.

The problem I have with getting closer is the dome hitting the subject or rocks and coral around it.   In this shot I was basically pressing the glass against the anemone trying to resolve the tiny shrimp:

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.

So far I'm avoiding using masking, partly due to not having Photoshop and working with Lightroom Classic.

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 almost never print now.   Mostly I shoot for the web, because I shoot for myself and I prefer the ease and accessibility of viewing my shots from a web server.  But one reason is that my Epson P600 is clogged, and I dread the expense of pumping ink through it in a vain attempt to get it working again.   The last time I printed I did a bunch of photos of my late wife Connie for her funeral.   As I printed the last photo (of a bunch), the printer clogged one of the colors, and it wasn't the same after that.  I didn't have the heart to print again either.  That was almost 3 years ago.

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.

My preference with macro and strobes is to live at ISO 64 and fully light what I want.   With ambient, not so much, and I have a lot of lighting challenges.   The way I post-process is very intensive (in my opinion), and I very very quickly see the limits of dynamic range contracting as I up the ISO.

Of course at some depths there just isn't enough color, and no amount of post-processing seems to make these images look decent.  I have done a bit of fiddling with ISO limits during a dive, but for the last year or so I've tried to just do a whole dive or a whole day using one setting and then seeing how a variety of subjects work within that.  I've tried setting the ISO to manual and to auto, and in manual I've tried 64, 100, 200, 320, 400, 800, 1000 and some way-too-high settings as well.

Here's a shot at ISO 320 that I only kept because of the Purple Crowned Sea Goddesses in there (and the fact that *I* found them when the divemaster had missed them).

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 suppose that is true, but I don't find it much effort to use the viewfinder.  I bought a nice high-eyepoint viewpiece (Nauticam 180 degree viewfinder, $1320) that makes it easy to see the whole image through my mask.  In addition, especially with macro, I use the viewfinder pressed against my mask as a third point of contact to stabilize the camera.

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.

Sounds fascinating.  I hope you'll post a bunch of shots (and explanations for shooting and processing) afterwards.

I love Roatan, but I need to get to some different dive sites.   Harder to do now that my dive-buddy wife is gone.   Also, I'm now 66 years old, and diving in Roatan is pretty easy, which is why I keep going back.  Everything at the Reef House Resort tends to work in my favor - empty dive boat, warm conditions, usually very little current, easy (or used to be) travel to/from, and inexpensive.  But I'm just getting the same shots year after year, though I do think I'm improving in certain ways from the practice.

A black water Hammerhead dive in Molokai last year showed me some limits to my abilities due to age, and after a rough dive I was the only diver who didn't make the second dive.  Then too I was puking from seasickness due to the very rough conditions.

I'd love to dive Bonaire, but I don't think it's the right choice for me to go and try to do it alone, particularly shore diving with a big camera rig.