Long Time, No Pics

It's been a LONG time since I posted, but I think I will give it a whack again. Today I went out freediving(as always) and brought my 18-55 lens on my 20D setup. I'm still getting used to this lens after spending a LONG time on the Oly 2020/4040/5050. I thought I had it somewhat figured out in the last couple days until I went out today and busted my tail to get some good pictures. I shot mostly around F11 and 1/125. I believe this musta been slow, as many of my pictures are poorly focused/blurry. Note to self--bump to 1/160 and make sure you're in RAW mode before wasting the afternoon. There were a couple of keepers, I guess.

Oval Butterflyfish

Bluestripe Butterflyfish

Yellow Tang

Whitespotted Surgeonfish

Hey, if you are freediving, it's a whole different ball game. Two lungs, one breath, maybe one or two quick shots? That's not bad.

Joe

You have some serious gear for free diving photography on reefs. Not knowing your time capacity underwater ,regardless I would think it is very hard to do this, composition, lighting etc. thinking about it while your body is thinking about air.

I think you do a good job for not having the time to wait, set up, adjust exposure, keep still etc. Just to be completely honest I wonder if you might get even better results with a more simpler point and shoot with a strobe (faster but less creative control) system that is more in tune with the limited time factor you have underwater.

I take it you are not familiar with freediving, so I will not take offense to your comments, as I'm sure they were meant in a helpful spirit. As for the "serious gear for free diving photography on reefs" there is no difference in underwater photography whether it be SCUBA or freediving. Shots have to be set up, lighting and exposure have to be accounted for, keeping still and neutrally bouyant still apply. You have to know your animals and know how to anticipate them. In addition have to have breath hold and depth. I am very amateurish and know many people who go much deeper for much longer than I do, but depth and bottom time are not my goals. My goal is to get pictures of the subjects I like. To me, I spend the majority of my time in the top 40' of water for between 1 and 2 and a half minutes. That's where the majority of my subjects are(over 200 so far) and SCUBA would be a waste of my time. Your down time is limited and I like to spend a good 3~4 hours in the water at a time. I just like the challenge and simplicity of freediving. I'm SCUBA certified and dive with friends in the local photo club on occasion, but I would much rather freedive.

As for photo equipment, I refer back to my previous statement. If you are serious about your photography, be serious about your gear. I have used the Oly 2020/4040/5050 over the years. Take a look at the galleries on my home page and you will see what I did with P&S cameras...I was very happy with my cameras, but it was time to evolve.

Anyway, please pardon if I sound hot-headed. I really do appreciate feedback...

To explain myself a littler better I mentioned free diving on reefs as opposed to the freediving on sleds in training and competitions. Those are diver oriented images as opposed to reef/fish/creature oriented. Many of the competitions are shot closer to the surface, getting on the bottom I think is a little more demanding regarding air consumption.

This is not the image improvement center but people still want feed back. I always mean to be helpful even if my honesty pisses people off. Frankly the pics above when I saw them looked very snap shottish noting as you stated you were getting used to the lens. The subjects were mostly centered, did not fill the frame, some cut off, a little blury etc. I left that stuff out. I thought simplfying a beginners setup would be more gratifiying and easier. I couldn't imagine myself taking pics even that good freediving in only 10 feet of water - This was where I was comming from.

Now after looking at your website it was like a different photographer Your not a beginner and the compositions on the site are far, far above these pics. The turtle compositions are really great. I completely agree with you on getting a better rig. You know what's going on.

-Steve

Your website was...well stunning. Well organized and some great pics of both the Turtles and Dolphins. I used to snorkel a lot. I often took excursions to the bottom but never went past about 25ft since I wasn't all that good at holding my air. I can't even begin to fathom taking pics while doing this. For what its worth, Photobeat is correct in his analysis that the fish photos you posted are not up to the standards set by your website. Thanks for sharing,

Gary

Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated. Agreed, the above isn't that good--with this lens, I have only a couple dives and it's hellish learning the F-stop equivalents with the Oly 5050 I shot before(since it is all done in manual mode). This and the amount of backscatter in the water have been my most frustrating elements. I was having a lot of difficulty with focus for some reason. A lot of shots were coming back blurred or soft focused. I thought the shutter speed bump to 160 might be better since I was shooting at the 55mm end of the 18-55 lens. I'm not convinced that was the case. I think backscatter in the water(lots of stuff floating around the last week or two) is throwing off the focus a bit. We'll see...still learning the lens. I will post some more examples of my next outing...of course, it was in murk as well...an overcast day swimming in skim milk...thanks for checking out the site. That's my old stuff--I need to port some stuff over from my image DB to make it look like I've done something lately!

Forgot to mention--the reason most everything was centered was because I am fleshing out fish ID shots. I like shooting fish ID shots and try to get broadside shots of animals from time to time. I try to get them as centered as possible, but like to leave a little room to see what is around them. As for the "honesty pissing people off" part, no problems here. I have no problems with people grilling the work. Bang away with a hammer. My only problem is when people associate freediving with lack of skill in the water. Anyway, on to other pics...

I think freeddiving is very skillful and admire people that can do it. But let's say a freediver shoots 50 pics freediving and 50 with scuba, common sense tells you he will get more quality pics with scuba. Time, ability to wait recompose, view lcd make adjustments. So it being easier to SCUBA and take pics we give the freedivers a break on the critques like Kelpfish was mentioning.

Umm...I guess that's where I choose to disagree. I think that you can make the statement "taking pictures on SCUBA is easier than taking pictures while freediving" but to make the statement that someone on SCUBA "will get more quality pics" assumes too much of the SCUBA photographer and too little of the freediver photographer. They both should be doing the same thing--setting the shot, waiting for the shot, making adjustments. If they haven't done that, they shouldn't be shooting the picture to begin with. The resultant 50 shots shouldn't be necessarily differentiable qualitatively. And therefore I don't think it benefits anyone to "give the freedivers a break on the critiques". If we're talking u/w photography, we should still be critiquing the same thing. Anyhoo, these aren't flames, just beliefs...