Mike Saunders

Gili Air was a great place to stay less spectacular but my first experience of muck diving in two dives and less current and easier to find a spot to stop and take images first frogfish!

just coming to the end of a wonderful trip to komodo and gili air. came with quite a lot of gear that I hadn’t really used much before - but after doing Alex Mustards excellent reboot course and then fannying about underwater for a fortnight several things are apparent taking good photos on a group dive is impossible- you need time and ‘normal’ dive groups don’t give it to you. ‘drive by’ snapping are very hit and miss you get what you pay for. The salted line alpha 6xxx housing is usually waterproof and cheap but don’t expect to be able to change the settings at 30m- at one point it was randomly scrolling though the iso settings for no reason - another times the shutter wouldn’t work the sony macro 90mm 2.8 is a stunning lens- when you can get it to focus! next time i even think about it i’ll put it on manual and set the focus before the dive - use a snoot and just take pictures of things that way. Should be great I’m definitely coming back to Indonesia

as a footnote, years ago I used to dive with a Nikon 35mm film body with a 60mm macro lens I now keep the lens at work in the drawer in clinic with an old d700 body to take pictures of patients - it still takes beautiful pictures every time I get it out I am staggered how heavy it is and equally staggered that I used to take it underwater in an Ikelite housing

wow I though the original question was quite simple but this has turned into a technical pandora's box and I have been fascinated to read the replies I'm on a sony alpha 6xxx set up which is firstly portable and secondly cheap(ish) I have always presumed that if you are shooting with a dome, the dome becomes a part of the lens system and may well be the most important quality limiting step as most lenses, even cheap ones, are pretty good. The second thing, at my stage is that there are far more significant factors limiting image quality than sensor size (technique, experience and so on) but I posted the original question while I was wondering if going from alpha 6xxx to alpha 7 ff would make much difference. My guess is not... thanks for all the excellent replies

what you can achieve in that environment and what the two cameras might be capable of, are two different things very much so!

technically speaking what are the advantages and disadvantages of the APSC and full frame cameras? clearly bigger sensor and more pixels with full frame, but beyond that are there any specific technical or optical matters of relevance to UW photography? Mike S

thanks I think I may have over darkened it in lightroom

thanks everyone I'm not underwater until September so i am using BBF on my camera at work and getting used to it I can see the advantages immediately but it is not second nature yet the recent shark dive with ultra wide angle produced very few out of focus shots but my attempts at macro in the past have been much worse - it seems like a definite for macro at least

do serious underwater photographers use back button focus rather than the standard shutter release? I'm wondering if it is a new skill I should try to master

bugger! I'm going in November....

Tamron seem to be producing a lot of interesting lenses I have the 11-20 2.8 apsc lens which is pretty sharp and much cheaper

accidentally overexposed on the strobes a bit but as I was shooting in raw I was able to take this down and give the photos a much more dramatic look by reducing the overall exposure. Quie pleased with some of these If anyone is in the South of the UK - these trips run from Plymouth with InDeep and a few out of Penzance compared to flying halfway round the world to see sharks at a distance this was an amazing experience. The sharks turn up eventually and then swim round and round you until you fill up your sd card or run out of batteries!

thanks for the advice strobe definiely made the images better I'll submit a few more when I have had time to sit down and process in LR

I have seen them thanks - they are fantastic it looks like strobe was used as there is too much light on the sharks face to really be from above strobes it is!

my thoughts are: if no strobes i can use program or similar to get fast shutter speed with available light- also much easier bobbing about near the surface without a big rig downside is that it might be a dark day - slower shutter speeds - and underneath of sharks could be very dark i can’t work out from the images if flash has. been used

i’m going on a blue shark day trip snorkelling only with blue sharks in july curious what you all advise about using strobes. it would be much simpler using natural light but would some fill in make the pictures much better? the attached images from the tour company website

great- thanks for all the advice

what size SD cards do you tend to take on a trip and how many? Furthermore, is there any merit in buying the expensive (faster) ones for still UW photography? A 32Gb card should store 1200 or so 25mb .raw images from my camera which is possibly a whole trip but I am reluctant to leave it all on one I was thinking of taking one card per day and backing up to a portable HDD in the evening (sorry if this specific topic has been covered before) Mike S

thanks

lewis88 - is there any special trick to getting the d3 to work ttl with pop up on a sony? what camera settings do you use? rear curtain synch? manual aperture and shutter speed?

backscatter say their control module (another 400 quid) would let the atom work with their fancy ttl system but that makes the package quite a lot more than two ts-d3 duos

cap on duty in Tenerife

this grumpy chap’s expression summed up the dive perfectly…

to be honest it was impossible shore night dive with swell and my mask misting up. could barely see let alone focus. turned strobes off and carried in with ring light only. makes one hell of a torch for night dives but really the surge was too much to get decent photos 😐 a calmer longer dive and more time would help