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 6 hours ago6 hr 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?