Memorable moments while diving the Galápagos Islands on a 7-day journey aboard the Calipso at the start of September. Nonstop incredible encounters with everything from hammerheads and eagle rays to marine iguanas and massive schools of barracuda.

Shot with:

Sony A7Siii in Nauticam housing

Sony 26-60 lens with Nauticam WWL-1B

SmallHD 502 monitor in Nauticam housing

Slog 3, manually white balanced

https://youtu.be/6_QCstrRugw

@Bronson FE That's lovely. Nicely done.

Real nice you got some great footage of the hammerheads and iguana. I like what looks like drone footage at the end too. Congrats!

nicely done! we were on Calipso last September and it also was a blast. 3 whale sharks over at Darwin - or one three times on three dives 🤣

Out of curiosity - I see a lot of noise on your footage - especially in the blues. Were you overexposing at all? On my A1 I have to brutally overexpose log footage otherwise I get a lot of noise too. Glad to see somebody else is lugging monitor around too :-) mine is shinobi :-)

6 hours ago, humu9679 said:

@Bronson FE That's lovely. Nicely done.

Thanks a lot! 🙏

3 hours ago, PeterN said:

Real nice you got some great footage of the hammerheads and iguana. I like what looks like drone footage at the end too. Congrats!

Much appreciated! That last shot was actually just coming back towards the boat on the skiff, but it did kind of create a drone-like camera movement 🙂

1 hour ago, RomiK said:

nicely done! we were on Calipso last September and it also was a blast. 3 whale sharks over at Darwin - or one three times on three dives 🤣

Out of curiosity - I see a lot of noise on your footage - especially in the blues. Were you overexposing at all? On my A1 I have to brutally overexpose log footage otherwise I get a lot of noise too. Glad to see somebody else is lugging monitor around too :-) mine is shinobi :-)

Thanks!

And you got it — the noise in some of those deeper hammer shots are probably from a combo of high base iso + being underexposed. I believe the technical recommendation is +1.7 exposure for slog, which I definitely didn’t always get up to unfortunately. 😅

And I love using a monitor! Game-changer. Though it’s definitely a challenge for some the extreme currents at wolf+darwin. Like holding a sail.

9 hours ago, Bronson FE said:

Thanks!

And you got it — the noise in some of those deeper hammer shots are probably from a combo of high base iso + being underexposed. I believe the technical recommendation is +1.7 exposure for slog, which I definitely didn’t always get up to unfortunately. 😅

And I love using a monitor! Game-changer. Though it’s definitely a challenge for some the extreme currents at wolf+darwin. Like holding a sail.

Sail! That! Exactly!🤣

If I may share my way dealing with overexposure... even though A1 has different sensor, also dual gain but maybe different... anyhow - I learned that ISO on A1 doesn't matter. Heck I can go 30000 and as long as I properly (over)expose I see no meaningful effect on noise. So I started to use ISO as gain and with shutter and aperture locked in I mapped (typically shutter) wheel to ISO. I display waveform on my monitor and push it to upper third as high as not to get cutoffs. Sometimes the overexposure is actually 3+ (!). On Nauticam housing that wheel is greatly available for thumb operation which helps me adjust 'gain' on the fly - like when following shark from deep blue to surface background.

Not sure how this is going to work for A7S3 sensor but for both A7S3 and A1 all YouTubers were swearing by using base ISO - only for me to find out that it was utter bollock. At least for A1.

And of course this wouldn't be possible without external monitor (with HDR conversion switched on). So cheers to sailors 😅