bghazzal

Welcome Ann! Very nice place to be, and easy to hop over to Palau too for a change of scenery 😀

Yes, very interested in logistical details as well - what kind of lights were used for the lures on the line, and how were they positionned? And was anyone shooting video on those dives? How did this work out with photgraphers? From what I read so far on basic black-water dive logistics, critters are attracted to the lure lights on the line then photographers focus on them and shoot away, eventually moving away from the line to some extent. But for video's constant lighting, I guess this would leave the option of either staying away from the lure lights with lights off, and turning on the lights when required or using one's one lighting as a lure light (which seems to be what is going on with Aquatilis), but this would probably be more of a solo option. Given the amount of critters we have even in shallow water here, my plan for "shallow black-water" tests is simply to tie a lure light to a deeper mooring rope at 10m and hang in the area, see what shows up (hopefully not just lionfish...) Current is usually mild enough to hang around, so if conditions are ok it would just be a question of following the critter a little, then returning to the line. I know some ops in Tulamben organise proper black-water from boats (not sure how far out they go), but I'd rather practice shooting video in similar conditions first, to try to figure out what works. I shot this tiny little critter yesterday at midday (lost it before I was setup for hand-held shooting, so no useable footage, unfortunately...) - no clue what this is, but if oddities like this can be spotted during the day, there's reason to hope l̶u̶r̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ hanging around in the dark (with DIY readers, hood and leggings - laundry basked optional 😁) might bring about some interesting encounters....

Guilty for the (neoprene) hood - knifeless calves, but nicely wrapped in black leggings under the shorts, my standard underwater guise when not wearing a wetsuit ... Wait, is this what they call oversharing? 😅

Indeed... not even sure that kind of thing is entirely legal in these parts 🤣🤣🤣

Wow - amazing footage indeed!! I'll be going for a deep dive in the Aquatilis project, thanks so much for this. Amazing critters as well, really fascinating. The simplicity of the stabilisation device is mind-blowing - I can totally see the logic, bulkier means more damping of handling movements. He's also not really using that many floats, but I think this is due to the large dome port, which must be quite posistive. Light positionning seems pretty straightforward, just angled-in a little for closeups - overall a really simple kit but seems to work great. To rebound on depth required, I totally agree - when I was on Hachijo Island in Japan, planktonic / larval were really special (I remember spending time try to shoot a larval mahi-mahi, which was pretty great), even though we were in a shallow harbour. Granted, it was quite deep and exposed to the Kuroshio current just a couple of miles out, but there was a lot going on in the shallows. Same thing in east-Bali - there is some depth closeby (the fishermen setup their fish-aggregating devices in a spot about 1500m deep...) and really powerful Indonesian through-flow current pumping through the Lombok straight, and there's a lot going on even in the shallows... I've become really lazy with night diving logistics, but seeing footage like this is really motivating and reminds me of what I'm missing out on....

Nice find! Allows the use of the Digipower extended battery kit down to 250m apparently

Sounds tricky - all Inon products are made for the GoPro dive housing. If the wide lens only come with custom SD mounts, one way to approach it would be to find some kind of adapter to get the wide lens to fit to a regular threaded mount, then use step-up/down rings You could maybe use something like this with the Digipower frame, since it mounts on the bare camera's lens protector, but this would need to be tested given the Digipower frame's added bulk Otherwise Puluz makes an adapter that fits directly on the bare cam's lens like so: Then it's just a question of making the wide lens of your choice work with a 52mm thread.

I used the Backscatter MacroMate Mini (+15) for a bit, it works quite well, when you get the working disance dialed in. I just sold mine to a local dive shop owner who's shooting primarily with a GoPro and getting good footage with it: Here's a closeup example he shot with the MacroMate cheers

As an update, the replacement MS-10 finally arrived today, January 5th 2024! 😀 SUPE came through and helped coordinate things between two Indonesian distributors!

Hello all, I've been shooting mostly macro video over the past few months and increasingly interested in juvenile / larval forms, and find "black-water" subjects quite fascinating. I personally haven't had the chance to try actual pelagic black-water diving yet, but have encountered interesting juvenile/larval critters in the water column on a standard shallow night dive, and fumbled to get shots -- While this is not true black-water diving, night-time critter migrations can be quite interesting in some locales, if the topography is right. I thought I'd open up a thread on the subject for people to share technical tips and ressources on how to get good video footage in a black-water shooting scenario, One aspect I'm particularly interested is video light positioning. A lot of the info for black-water still-shooting and strobe/light position can be transfered to video, but I'm sure there are also some specificities for video and constant-light shooting. There's an interesting article on the subject published by Mike Johnson in (now Waterpixels sponsor) X-Ray mag here: https://xray-mag.com/content/shooting-video-black-water-diving It has the following recommendations for video light positioning: "Regardless of how many lights you choose to shoot with, they should be angled from the side, top or bottom and set to fill the area where your macro lens is focusing on. I used two Light & Motion Sola 2000 Video lights, with one positioned at 9 o’clock and the second at roughly 1 o’clock. The light at 9 o’clock I set at 1000 lumen output, and the light at 1 o’clock I set at 500 lumen output. This did a really nice job of illuminating any translucent bodies, yet was still not too bright to overpower most of the bioluminescence." Rig buoyancy must be quite tricky as well - even though we are dealing with macro subjects, since most of the action takes place in the water column, the rig would need to be as neutral as possible to allow for short stable sequences, which is a world away from usually very tripod-dependent macro video... The difficulty of getting stable hand-held video footage of small critters moving freely in the water column would probably mean having to slow down footage at some point, not so much for actual slow-motion/stabilisation but rather to extend the length of a useable, in-focus sequence - meaning 60fps is probably required. I'm guessing this really depends on the critters, but I was wondering if using some kind of fixed highly directional light beam (thinking of a snoot beam, pointed up) might be an option to get planktonic critters closer to the rig, and other critters interested in these, functioning as a kind of critter-aggregating-device... This is just an idea, which would not be possible in a typical black-water with other photographers and divers hanging on a line - but I'm not sure how the constant-light requirements of black-water video shooting would combine with black-water still-shooting anyway. Looking forward to reading about your black-water video shooting experiments! cheers ben

Yep, I'd never tried for Japanese but it's not bad. Giving the conclusion (section begining 20.03 minutes in) a quick listen, to summarize he recommends the Inon, as it allows you to shoot in super view mode and switch to wide mode if you feel there is too much corner distortion while keeping roughly the same image quality as the AOI, whereas the AOI would vignette - since a fisheye lens is designed to shoot wider, he feels that Inon gives you more options in this sense. Note - Not having watched the whole thing, I'm not 100% sure what he means for the corners on the AOI - he uses a slightly technical expression ( 四隅けられる ) which usually refers to vignetting

Yep, it's one of the downsides. Considering it's easy to get a screen in most places, I'm starting to think Mac Minis might be an option for a semi-nomadic lifestyle. I actually left the macbook pro in Europe in 2017 - the macbook air has been surprisingly reliable, but I'll be happy to move back to something more punchy in the future. Great thanks

You're all making me drool - I edit 4K video in Final Cut Pro on a 2017 1.8 GHz Macbook Air with 8Gb of ram at the moment. I run FCPX directly from a Samsung T7 SSD instead of the macbook's hdd, which helps a lot. Not having a home to settle down in at the moment led to such minimalism, but a laptop with M1 processor would be fantastic, and the first thing I would get. I used macbook pros in the past (editing, and also visual mapping in Modul8), and also a souped up MacMini, but this was a while ago. Final Cut works running from the SSD works fine enough (I don't even use to use proxies to edit) but I can't run DaVinci Resolve for instance - well i can but can't get fluid playback, even with proxies...

Great stuff there! AOI products are really starting to get an edge these days, it seems. On the naming, i agree, I agree... Even ChatGPT could do a better job... It's one of the things that seems to live in a parallel dimension of its own - that said I confess to feeling a somewhat similar confusion regarding names of Sony Alpha cameras and Samsung Galaxy phones, so easily disoriented and probably not much of a reference 😄

Welcome Pete. I was working in Khao Lak for a few seasons and ended up staying over a year in Phuket during the pandemic (moving down there after the tambon lockdown was ancient memory...). We did some shote diving there, and have great memories of the Kata Beach mimic octopus colony! Really interesting macro in the area as well, a bit more difficult to find than further south, but great! cheers ben

I'm starting to think I have a doppelganger in the area, too concerned about style to go for the DIY option - I'm sure he probably shoots stills only too 😆

Yes, a Gravière du Fort article would be great - it's a pretty famous site in French diving! I've also often heard about Bécon-Les-Granits.

Aaaaaand look what just showed up on the interwebs: https://www.see-deep.com/ Somebody should have been quicker on the patent trigger 🤣🤣🤣

No need - you can even take it snorkeling, it's fine. Waterproofing was introduced with the GoPro5 and it works great. The dive housing is good protection, and my GoPro7 doesn't have integrated mounts like the newer models, so I just use the housing (otherwise I need a frame to mount it). Newer models have some kind of mounting option on the bare cam itself I think, so you can use that to mount to stick or something else. Not sure how it is for current models, but for older models you needed to remove the lens cover to get it to fit in the dive housing ("super suit"), but even without the lens cover the camera remains waterproof to 10m.

It will work great for that, no worries - stabilisation is amazing since the 7 and up, and with ProTune you can set the cam to a relatively flat profile (on mine, which is a 7, it's called "native" for WB, and colour profile to "flat"), which works great for grading. What I do in post is just start by reseting the white balance first, and then proceed to fine-tune and adjust to increase DR, contrast, saturation. Really nice. Not as much to work with compared to a bigger camera, but still good, especially topside. A pole mount works fine, especially with the new stabilisation capacities, but otherwise even a two handed hold directly onto the sides of the GoPro will (if not in a housing, make sure your fingers are far from the lens, so they're not in the field of view). The great thing about a pole is that you can also dunk the camera in the water from the side of the boat, and get good footage of marine mammals and the like, and if it's long enough get good shots from above, which can be great on a dive boat. It's funny that you should mention boat scenes, my in-laws+nieces just visited us in east Bali and I did a lot of boat-based shooting for a fishing trip on a jukung, snorkeling and also Balinese ceremonies in the evening.. For this I just had a freediving-style landyard on my wrist, then a diving coil landyard connected directly to the GoPro housing through a ring. Compact and discreet, stable, can't lose it or flood it, just worked great. Another slighty cheaper option you could look into for this the DJI Osmo Action Cam 4 cheers b

Wow - this sounds really bad - I remember reading up on this a while back. How is it in La Paz now? Same predatory customs-officers? If it's a little cooler, it could be worth flying to LaPaz airport, then driving down to Cabo San Lucas, maybe with a stop at Cabo Pulmo along the way? I worked in LaPaz in 2018, but didn't have any issues at the time, flying in/out from Mexico City. No custom checks that i can remember, despite our dive gear bags - we did have work-visas, but can't remember if this was checked/known by customs.

Great info - to add to Davide's clear and comprehensive summary of lighting options / requirements, on the subject of ambient light + ambient light filter Keldan, the company spearheading the "mixed lighting" approach (= shooting in ambient light with a red/spectrum filter while boosting closeup items with artificial light filtered to match the ambient light white balance) has recently issued lights with "pre-filtered" LED modules, intended to avoid having to use ambient filters on the lights and the loss of lighting power they incur. But this approach is still very fresh, seems a little bit fiddly and does limit the scenarios you can use your pre-filtered lights in... For wide-angle shallow-water tropical light style shooting scenarios, there is also the option to simpy go for ambient light only, preferably with a good filter on the lens to help the camera white-balance. Colours won't pop as much, and you won't get the foreground-background contrast that you get in stills, but it's also a rather pleasing and balanced palette, that some have called the "ambient light" look. The mixed-lighting approach - when it works - is the best of both worlds as get that smooth ambient light look but more details and, if required, vivid colours in the foreground. One thing to remember when shooting wide-angle in such tropical / shallows strong-ambient light scenarios is that quite a lot of colour info does actually make it onto the sensor, so if you're shooting in a rather flat profile there's actually a lot to work with when grading in post. Canon (and to some extent Panasonic cameras) are really your best options for ambient light video due to their white-balancing capabilities. The Fly&Dive channel has some really fantastic examples of what you can do with strong ambient light + grading only, and here are some graded ambient light tests I shot at different depth (shooting info in the subs), to check WB possibilities on a Panasonic compact. cheers ben

I use this for a compact rig - bought it in Thailand a while back - unfortunately the quadripod legs / clamps have ripped holes in the inner lining: https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/Large-Insulated-Cooler-Cool-Shoulder-Bag-Outdoor-Camping-Picnic-Lunch-Handbag/1DBDGXEYL609

You guys also forgot the banner for the kidney bank sponsoring Waterpixels.

Welcome Ludo! Happy to see you've hopped on over and joined the happening-est UW-imaging forum in town. Not many Indonesian flags around, and you've been here so many times you should get honourary flag-ship at the very least 😉 cheers! ben