Don't fill the counter.... Fill the frame

Fill the Frame and not the counter: close and close and close.

Compose your picture in the viewfinder and after, only, you can shoot.

Just at this instant you feel a good vibration in your heart or stomach and more ... if it's a shark at 30 cm!

When you begin photographing you have just one aim: come back with 36 pictures in the box at the end of your dive.

After ...... several years ...... you bracket each view 5, 6 or 7 times above different angles, with different apertures and different lights.

The result: 5 or 6 beautiful subjects and not 36 "souvenirs".

Pierre, with a digital camera if you only come back with 35 images you are wasting your time. I usually shoot 40 to 50 images on a dive :ph34r:

Dave,

Looking at this from both sides I can see the confusion raised by Pierre's comments being based around his 35mm experience.

However, the point he is trying to get across (and with digital you do get more flexibility) is not just to take one shot of a subject in one pose and move on - experiment with position and lighting, two strobes and one strobe and so on.

There is a lot of sense in it, bringing out the creativity lurking behind those otherwise snappy fore fingers!

I don't disagree. My point was that digital is much better for bracketting shots. When I get a good subject with the digital I will shoot maybe as many as 10 to 20 shots with the digital. With film maybe 4 or 5 and still run out of film with some great subject sitting in front of me.

I decided to get a digtal camera during a trip to Komodo last Dec. Every dive I would run out of film and miss several good subjects. Missed photos of mating Octupuses and Cuttlefish. Even on raw you can get over 100 images on a 1 MB microdrive. Conversely, sometimes I had a dive when I didn't shoot all my film. Then you had to decide if you want to waste half a roll or worry about running out of film on the next dive.

Now I only have to remember to keep the batteries charged.

Note DS125 strobes are great for doing a lot a bracketting. They recycle almost instantaneously and I get a lot of shots out of a charge. I typically change the batteries once a day and have never run one down. :ph34r: