Wide Angle Underwater

PHXAZCRAIG wrote:

And do they give you enough time to get the shot?

I've been thinking a bit about this, and whether I rush things on dives. Sometimes, yes, I've felt some time pressure on dives, but not in Roatan. In Jamaica definitely, when I stayed at a resort that offered free diving, but limited bottom time to 30 minutes for the shallow dive (45 feet?) and only 20 on the deep dive (60+ feet).

I'm not a very slow shooter by nature, but there have been times in Roatan when I took a long time trying for one particular shot. I'm thinking blennys in surge current. Took 30 shots once hoping one was nicely focused. Got about 5. And if there had been other divers there, I might have had to break off and follow the group. But that was the D810, and the multiple attempts were due to autofocus limitations. With the D850 I've found that 29 out of 30 of those shots would be in focus, and I just can work much faster now.

If it's a matter of waiting out some creature to come out of a hole, or stopping to interact with something unusual, we usually have no problem taking 5 minutes to watch it.

On one dive this last trip, we had already been under quite a long time as I had 12 minutes of deco time to bleed off. (Suunto...) At about the 73 minute mark we came upon an octopus in a hole. The divemaster had a nicely-trimmed lionfish on the end of his spear that he was taking home for lunch. (He spears them, pulls out scissors and cuts off all the fins and spines and descales as well while diving along.) He sacrificed his lionfish to tempt the octopus out, and we spent 5-6 minutes watching him before coming up. I managed to bleed off the rest of my deco time doing that as the depth was about 12 feet.

It's really nice to be the only diver on the boat. The way I've been scheduling my visits, it's the norm for me. 75% of my dives there are just me and the divemaster.

This is very compelling reasoning.  In groups, I don't even try anymore to get in for a shot.

rick decker wrote:

Why is it we see so few wide-angle shots on the forum. Are they too difficult to shoot? That is one thing I have found in my years of diving.

I don't really do anything but WA-Shots as I only have a WA lens. Most wouldn't be recognized as WA as they are WACF do get past freshwater murkiness. But here you go:

Very nice.