Hello all,

Here's a little something I shot on the A7SIII last week, here on Okinawa main island.

I don't usually like sharing vertical-format posts and will work on a horizontal edit of this footage, but I thought I would share it anyway because, technically speaking, it highlights something I've been playing with for a bit that is starting to come together: mixed lighting for medium / closeup shots.

So here is a vertical clip of pair of Devil scorpionfish (Scorpaenopsis diabolus, false stonefish), with a large white female seemingly not too bothered by the smaller male following her around ...
All in love is fair, after all ^^
Music track is “Reasons to Be Cheerful” by O’Brien & Carvis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwI0DFC4h98

Now to get down to the nitty-gritty, the clip was shot with a manual white balance set to ambient light, along with three filtered light sources (two Kraken Hydra 8000 V2s and one Backscatter MW4300).
The light sources are filtered with @DreiFish formula filters, i.e. Dreifilters (see here for more details: https://waterpixels.net/forums/topic/1413-red-filters-and-blue-ambient-light-filters-for-mixed-light-shooting

Macro and closeup footage is usually shot with full artificial lighting, which is fine for smaller critters and tighter shots, night dives, blackwater etc.
However, when we move to larger subjects, say in the 10 cm+ range, things become a little more complicated.
Keeping the lighting fully artificial-light-dominant means using a lot of light, and for wide shots in daylight (say, a mimic octopus hunting), we get a strong spotlight effect, with an artificially lit foreground and a dull greenish background where artificial lighting doesn't reach. It is not possible to move from close-up shots to wider shots using the same white balance, and blasting artificial light can also be harsh on our subjects.

To try to work around these limitations and also use less artificial light, I started playing with mixed-lighting techniques, applying the technique Keldan and others have developped for wide-angle shooting: white balancing to ambient light, but using filtered artificial light to roughly match sunlight (and thus avoid the warm red spike resulting from the difference between the artificial light source's unfiltered spectrum and sunlight's spectrum as filtered by seawater at depth).

This mixed-lighting technique using ambient filters on the lights is normally used mainly for wide-angle shots, but it also works for mid-range to close-up shots.
The technique is the same: manually white balance to ambient light (sunlight) and use filtered artificial light.
The role of the light is to bring out the textures and highlights and make the footage pop, avoiding the slightly washed-out pastel tones of full ambient light (the "ambient light look" )
At the same time, white balancing to ambient light allows us to move seamlessly from close-up to wider shots, including a nicely balanced background.

The effect is subtle, but definitely there. The footage pops in the foreground, and you can film in darker areas, under rocks or coral, and, more importantly, keep the same white balance when moving from close-up of your subject to a wider, contextual shot, which is super useful for video shooting.

The way I would describe it is having portable sunlight underwater. And as you can see, the background and water column match the foreground white balance.

And no, it's not just ambient light. It was a cloudy morning, and If you look closely, you can see the shadow cast by my light at 24" in, on the body of the white female devil scorpionfish ( here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwI0DFC4h98&t=24s = ) as well as the details of the animal's surface where the light is hitting it.
One thing I also appreciate is that filtered light seems to be less aggressive on our subjects, because its power is diminished by filtering of course, but also perhaps because artificial light spectrum is roughly the same as that of ambient sunlight. I use long arms to get the lights close to the subject.

Gear-wise, this was filmed on the Sony A7SIII with a Weefine WED-5 Pro monitor, in manual mode, with Picture Profile Off and the Standard Creative Look, at 4K60p, using a Sony 100mm macro lens with the Nauticam MFO3 converter, f/13 and MF if i remember correctly.
It is lit by ambient sunlight as well as two Kraken Hydra 8000 V2s and one Backscatter MW4300 video lights, all equipped with ambient Dreifilters, and the manual white balance to ambient light was done without a filter on the lens, just using a Whibal slate, as the A7SIII balances well without one. Depth was around 10 m, on Okinawa main island on a cloudy day.

The nature of the footage made it difficult to work with in vertical format (which I mostly deeply hate, o tempora, o mores), but it forces us to be a little creative with zooms, pans etc. Editing was done in Final Cut Pro X 12.0

I thought I'd share this as is to illustrate the technique of using mixed lighting for closeup shots medium range footage, and I'll be sharing more mixed-lighting medium-range footage in the near future, as it is finally coming together.

Cheers!
Ben

Edited October 15Oct 15 by bghazzal

Very nice work, Ben. I'm glad my ambient light filter tests produced a formula that's proved useful to you. I haven't had a chance to revisit that particular experiment in the past few years (or shoot much video underwater) but good that you've kept it alive.

Despite being vertical 🤪, that's nice work @bghazzal ! Are you using Kraken filters? If the industry could make temperature adjustable video lights like their above water counterparts that would be a nice thing, eh? What are you using as a tripod?

11 hours ago, DreiFish said:

Very nice work, Ben. I'm glad my ambient light filter tests produced a formula that's proved useful to you. I haven't had a chance to revisit that particular experiment in the past few years (or shoot much video underwater) but good that you've kept it alive.

Thanks for the kind words, and thanks again for coming up with the magic formula Andrei!
Hope you'll return to the dark side and get back to shooting moving pictures underwater soon! 😁

9 hours ago, humu9679 said:

Despite being vertical 🤪, that's nice work @bghazzal ! Are you using Kraken filters? If the industry could make temperature adjustable video lights like their above water counterparts that would be a nice thing, eh? What are you using as a tripod?

Thanks, Craig! Nope, not Kraken filters. I’d love to try them, though.

My primary lights, the Kraken Hydra 8000 V2s, have a flat port with a 55 mm thread, which is fantastic.
I just wish the newer / larger Kraken models also had a flat port with a thread instead a of dome port with no thread, as I find this super useful for my shootin purposes.
This threaded flat port is great for filters and blackwater barndoors, for instance, and flat ports are nice really for macro shooting and blackwater too.
The threaded flat port is much easier to tinker with than slip-on alternatives designed for dome ports.

I actually found 55 mm flip holders designed for lenses, so I now have the ambient filters on a flip mount on the lights (!) and can switch easily 🤙

I'm using homemade ambient filters based on the formula discovered by Dreifish, which involves mixing Lee and Rosco filter gels, plus a bit of frog’s spit and some mandragora under a full moon 😁

More details here: https://waterpixels.net/forums/topic/1413-red-filters-and-blue-ambient-light-filters-for-mixed-light-shooting

The filters are made using a step-down ring and a step-up ring, with an O-ring to keep pressure on the gels.

For the Backscatter MW4300, I use Backscatter;s coloured filter mount to hold the gels in place.

It looks like this:

I’m not using the red filter on the lens, as the A7SIII handles manual white balance well at depth without one, unlike the Lumix LX10.

Tripod wise, it's a little complicated - I use a setup similar to Ryo Minemizu's, ie. an ULCS sled kit, where I replaced the side-rails with Inon floats - I have 4 ball-mounts on the side onto which I can attach 4 legs

Edited October 16Oct 16 by bghazzal

Nice work, and an interesting idea. I had poo-poo'ed the idea of filters on lights since I mostly shoot macro - but I now understand why that might be useful.

On 10/16/2026 at 11:58 PM, SwiftFF5 said:

Nice work, and an interesting idea. I had poo-poo'ed the idea of filters on lights since I mostly shoot macro - but I now understand why that might be useful.

Yes, it's mostly useful for mid-range shots, and also allows you to use weaker powered lights closer to the subject and include the background in wider shots - i started thinking about this in east Bali, when I was regularly filming mimic octopuses. Everyonce in a while one would get comfy, leave its burrow and start hunting around.

If anyone's interested, here are the Dreifilters homemade ambient filters mounted on my Kraken Hydra 8000v2, using 55mm flip adapters.
If just flip them off for super macro.


Never turn the light on with the filters in place on land, as the gels melt in a few seconds.

cheers
b

Edited October 18Oct 18 by bghazzal

@bghazzal

<<<I actually found 55 mm flip holders designed for lenses, so I now have the ambient filters on a flip mount on the lights (!) and can switch easily 🤙

I'm using homemade ambient filters based on the formula discovered by Dreifish, which involves mixing Lee and Rosco filter gels, plus a bit of frog’s spit and some mandragora under a full moon 😁>>>

I remember you going through all the machinations with GoPros. You seem to have worked it out.

I really like the idea of the flip diopter holder so you're not locked in to a particular way of shooting. Another thought I had was just using a portion of a Rosco gel to warm up or cool down a light without having to cover the whole head? Above water, I had, on occasion, used just a small piece of red or amber gels to warm up a strobe, and I would just eyeball it. These days it's so much easier than carrying around a color temperature meter.

As for the ULCS sled - very cool. But, man I hate hauling more stuff into the ocean!

Good stuff Ben!

Craig

Edited October 18Oct 18 by humu9679
additional

Well done ,congrats!

As a follow-up to this post, here's something I shot this morning to illustrate the technique. These are straight-out-of-camera (A7SIII, Sony 100mm macro with MFO3) video screenshots taken on my laptop.

This giant frogfish was swimming around and was very active. I first filmed it using a standard setup, white-balanced to my artificial lights:

Basically, to avoid a green background when white-balancing to artificial light, the solution would have been to blast it with more lumens.
But even then, given that video lights have a limited throw of around a meter, the background would still have been green in wider shots or at certain angles (green that I would probably have made bluer in post).
It's less a problem for closeups of subject say sitting on the reef or sand, but this guy was swimming around, off the ground, which means a more present unlit background.

I then took a manual white balance for ambient sun light and added ambient filters to my video lights. Same subject, same depth, etc.:



I find the mixed lighting solution much more pleasant and natural-looking. You can see the filtered lights at play on the frogfish's shadow, texture, and inside the mouth on the yawn.

cheers
Ben

Edited October 27Oct 27 by bghazzal

It's a really cool film showing lots of behaviour where the changign point of view helps telling the story.

On 10/30/2026 at 1:54 AM, Rune Edvin Haldorsen said:

It's a really cool film showing lots of behaviour where the changign point of view helps telling the story.

Thanks, Rune. I'd never seen that tail-lifting motion to... err, do whatever she's doing😅 It was quite surprising.
Mating-related for sure. These are normally quite solitary, but the male was following her like her shadow ❣️

On 10/15/2026 at 11:34 AM, bghazzal said:

Hello all,

Here's a little something I shot on the A7SIII last week, here on Okinawa main island.

I don't usually like sharing vertical-format posts and will work on a horizontal edit of this footage, but I thought I would share it anyway because, technically speaking, it highlights something I've been playing with for a bit that is starting to come together: mixed lighting for medium / closeup shots.

So here is a vertical clip of pair of Devil scorpionfish (Scorpaenopsis diabolus, false stonefish), with a large white female seemingly not too bothered by the smaller male following her around ...
All in love is fair, after all ^^
Music track is “Reasons to Be Cheerful” by O’Brien & Carvis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwI0DFC4h98

Now to get down to the nitty-gritty, the clip was shot with a manual white balance set to ambient light, along with three filtered light sources (two Kraken Hydra 8000 V2s and one Backscatter MW4300).
The light sources are filtered with @DreiFish formula filters, i.e. Dreifilters (see here for more details: https://waterpixels.net/forums/topic/1413-red-filters-and-blue-ambient-light-filters-for-mixed-light-shooting

Macro and closeup footage is usually shot with full artificial lighting, which is fine for smaller critters and tighter shots, night dives, blackwater etc.
However, when we move to larger subjects, say in the 10 cm+ range, things become a little more complicated.
Keeping the lighting fully artificial-light-dominant means using a lot of light, and for wide shots in daylight (say, a mimic octopus hunting), we get a strong spotlight effect, with an artificially lit foreground and a dull greenish background where artificial lighting doesn't reach. It is not possible to move from close-up shots to wider shots using the same white balance, and blasting artificial light can also be harsh on our subjects.

To try to work around these limitations and also use less artificial light, I started playing with mixed-lighting techniques, applying the technique Keldan and others have developped for wide-angle shooting: white balancing to ambient light, but using filtered artificial light to roughly match sunlight (and thus avoid the warm red spike resulting from the difference between the artificial light source's unfiltered spectrum and sunlight's spectrum as filtered by seawater at depth).

This mixed-lighting technique using ambient filters on the lights is normally used mainly for wide-angle shots, but it also works for mid-range to close-up shots.
The technique is the same: manually white balance to ambient light (sunlight) and use filtered artificial light.
The role of the light is to bring out the textures and highlights and make the footage pop, avoiding the slightly washed-out pastel tones of full ambient light (the "ambient light look" )
At the same time, white balancing to ambient light allows us to move seamlessly from close-up to wider shots, including a nicely balanced background.

The effect is subtle, but definitely there. The footage pops in the foreground, and you can film in darker areas, under rocks or coral, and, more importantly, keep the same white balance when moving from close-up of your subject to a wider, contextual shot, which is super useful for video shooting.

The way I would describe it is having portable sunlight underwater. And as you can see, the background and water column match the foreground white balance.

And no, it's not just ambient light. It was a cloudy morning, and If you look closely, you can see the shadow cast by my light at 24" in, on the body of the white female devil scorpionfish ( here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwI0DFC4h98&t=24s = ) as well as the details of the animal's surface where the light is hitting it.
One thing I also appreciate is that filtered light seems to be less aggressive on our subjects, because its power is diminished by filtering of course, but also perhaps because artificial light spectrum is roughly the same as that of ambient sunlight. I use long arms to get the lights close to the subject.

Gear-wise, this was filmed on the Sony A7SIII with a Weefine WED-5 Pro monitor, in manual mode, with Picture Profile Off and the Standard Creative Look, at 4K60p, using a Sony 100mm macro lens with the Nauticam MFO3 converter, f/13 and MF if i remember correctly.
It is lit by ambient sunlight as well as two Kraken Hydra 8000 V2s and one Backscatter MW4300 video lights, all equipped with ambient Dreifilters, and the manual white balance to ambient light was done without a filter on the lens, just using a Whibal slate, as the A7SIII balances well without one. Depth was around 10 m, on Okinawa main island on a cloudy day.

The nature of the footage made it difficult to work with in vertical format (which I mostly deeply hate, o tempora, o mores), but it forces us to be a little creative with zooms, pans etc. Editing was done in Final Cut Pro X 12.0

I thought I'd share this as is to illustrate the technique of using mixed lighting for closeup shots medium range footage, and I'll be sharing more mixed-lighting medium-range footage in the near future, as it is finally coming together.

Cheers!
Ben

Love the music 😂

As a follow-up, here's a horizontal edit of the same sequence. It's less of a dramatic reveal, but I think it illustrates the use of mixed lighting a little better:

Cheers!
Ben

Edited Sunday at 01:57 AM3 days by bghazzal