Cayman Parrotfish

This is my favorite of the pictures I took in Grand Cayman last week. It was my first time really trying at underwater photography. This is certainly a "library shot" composure-wise. I've learned a bit more about composition since I returned and now know better than to chase down and "target shoot" fish--definately exhibited here. Would you like to see my fish butt photos? I have plenty.

Anyway, In this one I think I got most of it right. I especially like the color once I corrected it in Photoshop Elements. I shot this with a canon digital elf s300 and Ikelite DS125 strobe and TTL sensor. I was using a Sea and Sea 16 mm lens. The strobe was in manual at 1/8 setting. The camera chose f/2.7 and 1/202 sec Subject distance was 1 m I was shooting in manual with white balance -2ev on cloudy.

The original was blue-green with muted colors. I fixed this in Photoshop using autolevels, adjusting hue, saturation and manually adjusting the levels.

Some problems I already notice:

1 a little backscatter at the bottom of the image. I need to position my strobe better.

2 a little overexposure on the coral at the botom left.

This time I was successful "shooting up". I got lucky and the fish came up. Even though I kept repeating this mantra over and over in my head during the dive I just couldn't do it in most cases. The fish were down in the coral, usually with their mouths on the bottom, and there was no way I could get down into that forest without bumping something. How do you do it?

Thanks for your honest opinion. Feel free to comment on the image editing as well. Go ahead and show me how you would do it better.

Chris

oops. Sorry this is so big, I'll reduce the size next time. :freak:

This is a nice shot of a fish that normally hates publicity and especially paparazzi! Again it shows of Caymans - Scatter is not degrading.

You can isolate the fish and polish it if you like, but the rest is fine.

PS Post pictures longest side 600 pixels @ 100dpi - 50 kb +/-

Around the outline of the fish are what looks to me like jpeg artifacts. I don't know if you got them during post processing or if it was in the original. If it was, try using a higher quality compression setting in the camera if possible.

Herb,

I think it is post processing: Maybe due to a large file dramatically stripped of resolution before getting resized.

Those aren't there in the original. I took the photo in 2.1 mpixel jpeg format (the camera has no raw setting) then reduced it for the site. In this case I didn't resize the image, my bad, but just increased the compression ratio.

In my future posdtings I'll reduce the resolution as well to 600 x (<600) as well as incresing compression. The mistake was obvious once I saw the posting.

Thanks,

Chris