Hi all,

I'm currently in the Azores, and shooting bluesharks at Condor Bank. Besides being fascinated by those amazing animals, I'm looking to get some good pictures.

I've had success with shooting manual (both camera and strobes), but as they circle around it's one picture against the sun, the next one with the sun in the back. This leads to a lot of under- or overexposed shots (especially with the sun, it's the white ball of death).

I thought about switching to shutter priority (1/160 or 1/200), auto-ISO (limited to 100-800) and maybe even TTL.

Setup is a Sony A7IV with a Canon 8-15 on a 2x teleconverter (so even open aperture would be 8 at least), 140mm dome, Turtle TTL trigger and Retra ProMax strobes with diffusors.

Does anyone have been in the same situation and has tried it or found some arguments for or against the idea?

Probably giving it a couple of minutes next time just to try, but I'm really curious what the community thinks.

Thanks all!

Congratulations to this beautiful photo of the blueshark, Fabian...👍

Was it made with the Canon 8-15mm/2x TC combination?

I cannot tell about bluesharks, but when I am snorkelling with dolphins or whalesharks, I always use fixed shutter (at least 1/160s, but 1/200s or even 1/360 is better), fixed aperture and Auto ISO for automatic exposure. So far this worked very well. On these occasions I do not have strobes with me...

When I am scubadiving, I use strobes (manual settings) and manual exposure to give good water color. Never tested TTL (I saw a tread about TTL for sharks by user StuartV on Scubaboard, but i thik he did not become happy with it)

The blueshark does not seem to be shy. Maybe one can leave out the TC to get wider aperture than f/8 (in case natural light is a problem)?

Wolfgang

Edited 20 hours ago20 hr by Architeuthis

Thank you Wolfgang, yes, this image was taken with the 2x TC but at 16mm.

They indeed are not very shy, but sometimes I do have to zoom in a little bit, and below F8 I wouldn't want to shoot.

I'll tru to find StuartVs posts on scubaboard, thanks!

The solution I think is to trial it in a systematic way. Take some water shots in maybe auto ISO and check your results. Take shots with the sun behind and in front and see what they are like. The camera will try to make the water middle grey in tone and you may need some exposure compensation. Hopefully the exposure comp will be the same for the two extremes.

You will probably also need to try different apertures and shutter speeds to get the exposure right at the extremes of lighting, no good for example being at ISO200 with the sun behind you and only being able to go as low as ISO100 into the sun if you go the auto ISO route.