Blue Water Macro Dive - East Bali

[bghazzal]

Here's a little something I shot last week, just two days after the full-moon on the shores of the Lombok Strait in east Bali.
 

Going to my usual critter hunting spot, I expected to spend the dive on the black sand as usual. But as I reached the edge of the plateau and the sandy-slope facing the deep waters of the strait, my attention was instantly caught byweird critters floating around everywhere, including quite a few jewels I'd never seen before...

Water was quite clear, with a mild current, and I spent the whole dive hovering and drifting with the plankton, then returning to the same area and drifting again with a new subject. Wee!

An exciting and fascinating day-dive - for someone in love larval and planktonic lifeforms at least 😅 - challenging, but a welcome change from the area's usual macro suspects !
 

 

 

Technically, shooting in the shallows in full-tropical morning light, I reached the limits of my 5000-ish lumen light supply (a single Backscatter MW4300 4000 lm  + 2 Archons 1000 lm), so I experimented with light positioning, including black-backround type shots, to try to make up for that.

Clearly what I was really really missing in this kind of shooting scenario was a powerful secondary light, and this has convinced me to invest in more artificial light in the near future, which should definitely help!
 

I shot with +6 diopter and even went up +12.5, as some were quite tiny, manual focus as usual, 30fps.
There's a definite learning curve as the critters are so light that body and camera movements affect them greatly for instance, and what worked best for filming was really hovering motionless and letting the current carry us along...

 

A great dive overall where i drained the camera battery, and really good practice for bonfire-type shallow black-water shooting I plan on doing here as well.
 

 

Equipment used:
- Panasonic Lumix LX10 (LX9/LX15 in some locales) compact camera  in a NALX10 Nauticam housing, AOI UCL-09 +18.5 diopter, Inon UCL-165M67 +6 diopter
- Backscatter MW 4300 video light and two Archon D11V2 video lights
- Shot in Amed, east Bali, in 4K 30fps, CineD profile 
 

cheers!

ben

 

 

Edited July 30 by bghazzal

[Troporobo]

Very cool - thanks for sharing!

[Davide DB]

Nice video and nice idea.
You described everything so well that it is difficult to ask you any more questions 😁
I was just reflecting on the fact that this type of diving has really opened up a new world of discovery from a scientific point of view.

[John E]

Fantastic ..  and the music choice works so well. 

[fruehaufsteher2]

Incredible beautiful. Much of what can be seen at Nat GEO is worse.

 

Did you switch from auto-ISO to manual? There's one scene where the exposure settings seem to change?

[bghazzal]

20 hours ago, Davide DB said:

Nice video and nice idea.
You described everything so well that it is difficult to ask you any more questions 😁
I was just reflecting on the fact that this type of diving has really opened up a new world of discovery from a scientific point of view.

Thanks - I'm really getting into this kind of critters now, that and juvenile / larval forms, it's like a whole new world opening up, a candybox of shapes and motion - but not easy to access or record... and so much is up to conditions... 😅

[bghazzal]

18 hours ago, John E said:

Fantastic ..  and the music choice works so well. 

Thanks John - once I have a general idea of what I can use work with, I look for music to edit to, playing some clips with different sound proposal, see what works best for me - I then present the idea to a severe and more often than not grumpy commission, my wife's eyes and ears, see if she validates it or not. We're both former musicians, which doesn't really make it easier 😅

But all of this is probably a little futile in our day and age where a lot of videos are played on phones with sound off 😁

[bghazzal]

16 hours ago, fruehaufsteher2 said:

Incredible beautiful. Much of what can be seen at Nat GEO is worse.

 

Did you switch from auto-ISO to manual? There's one scene where the exposure settings seem to change?

Thank you - it's all very fresh and still a good-way to go I think 😄

Well spotted for the exposure - I don't actually have auto-ISO on the camera - while settings are very close to the GH series, auto-ISO wasn't included in the mix - so this was all shot in manual at 125 ISO.

Most critters were actually moving up and down in the water-column, so I was yo-yo'ing more than any self-respecting instructor should - even on nitrox - and I think what you're seeing is actually coming from depth/lighting change in manual mode.
Boosting the power of my available artificial lighting should fix this by overpowering more of the ambient light I hope (that or focusing on critters doing more reasonable dive profiles 😁)
 

[scubadiggy]

Throughly enjoyed watching this...Not easy to shoot the teeny ones for sure probably impossible for my aged eyes 🙂

 

Thanks for sharing.

 

Diggy

[bghazzal]

21 hours ago, scubadiggy said:

Throughly enjoyed watching this...Not easy to shoot the teeny ones for sure probably impossible for my aged eyes 🙂

 

Thanks for sharing.

 

Diggy

Thanks Diggy! Yeah, I'm there as well, and quite the sight with my UW-readers, I'm sure 😅

[humu9679]

@bghazzal Ben - really nice! Again, I'm amazed at your manual focusing and just nailing this stuff. I have hard time making stills of sea stars.

[bghazzal]

20 hours ago, humu9679 said:

@bghazzal Ben - really nice! Again, I'm amazed at your manual focusing and just nailing this stuff. I have hard time making stills of sea stars.

Thanks Craig! My bright red focus peaking is a lifeline, just get it as red as possible and try to keep it that way 😄

cheers

b

[canislupus]

Like others have said, fantastic video, very good work, impressive!!

Thanks for sharing and for the detailed description.

[bghazzal]

On 8/17/2024 at 2:55 PM, canislupus said:

Like others have said, fantastic video, very good work, impressive!!

Thanks for sharing and for the detailed description.

Thanks!
After a lot of tossing and turning, I've just had major light upgrade, and while there's a lot to do get back cruising speed in terms of trim and buoyancy I hope to work on these blue water subjects in the coming weeks if they're around. First tests with the new lights today were quite promising.
Pretty interesting stuff going on in there, especially when it comes to planktonic hitchhikers 😉
cheers
b

[humu9679]

2 hours ago, bghazzal said:

Thanks!
After a lot of tossing and turning, I've just had major light upgrade, and while there's a lot to do get back cruising speed in terms of trim and buoyancy I hope to work on these blue water subjects in the coming weeks if they're around. First tests with the new lights today were quite promising.
Pretty interesting stuff going on in there, especially when it comes to planktonic hitchhikers 😉
cheers
b

What lights did you get?

[bghazzal]

10 hours ago, humu9679 said:

What lights did you get?

it was a tough choice beleive me 😅 After a lot of tossing and turning through what I could buy in Indonesia, I finally got the new Kraken Hydras 8000 V2 - lighter than the previous at -290g underwater, and they're constant output with 40 minutes at 8000lm and 60 at 6000lm.
 

Only one test so far, but light quality out-of-box is really better than the MW4300 (which I am keeping), a higher CRI does make a difference and I really don't understand why Backscatter went for a CRI 0f 70.
 

Ergonomics are so-so because of the RGBU mode - for useability it would be better if it could be locked away somewhere so you won't risk activating it when shooting with standard lighting.

Dealing with 4 power buttons is complicated enough for me in the field, and unfortunately a quick double press on high power activates a cycling RGB mode, which is not a good design choice at all, because guess what happens when you quickly increase the power to the max... disco-time!
I'm hoping the remote will solve these issues 😄

Edited August 19 by bghazzal

[humu9679]

13 hours ago, bghazzal said:

it was a tough choice beleive me 😅 After a lot of tossing and turning through what I could buy in Indonesia, I finally got the new Kraken Hydras 8000 V2 - lighter than the previous at -290g underwater, and they're constant output with 40 minutes at 8000lm and 60 at 6000lm.
 

Only one test so far, but light quality out-of-box is really better than the MW4300 (which I am keeping), a higher CRI does make a difference and I really don't understand why Backscatter went for a CRI 0f 70.
 

Ergonomics are so-so because of the RGBU mode - for useability it would be better if it could be locked away somewhere so you won't risk activating it when shooting with standard lighting.

Dealing with 4 power buttons is complicated enough for me in the field, and unfortunately a quick double press on high power activates a cycling RGB mode, which is not a good design choice at all, because guess what happens when you quickly increase the power to the max... disco-time!
I'm hoping the remote will solve these issues 😄

Sounds really good. I'm heading in that direction, too, with a remote.