Cavern sunballs

Hi all,

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to do some cavern diving in Florida, and I tried to take some sunball shots with my 5050. Needless to say, I found it challenging in the extreme. I'm afraid that the extreme range of lighting was beyond the dynamic range of the 5050. Both of these images were taken at the Blue Grotto in Crystal River Florida. Having a 100ft of crystal clear spring water was, for me, a rare experience. The color of the sunlight at the bottom of the Grotto was an electric blue that is hard to describe in words and even harder to capture in an image. Both of these are images of my professional dive model, umm, wife Here are the results.

This one unfortunately has a wire going through her head. I plan on photoshopping it out, even it compromises the integrity of the image

Very cool. Nice clouds too. How about some camera/strobe setting details?

Joe

You did a great job with that sunball. I dove those springs before, and I know how clear the water is! Sometimes you have the impression that there is no water at all!

Luiz

Both images were taken with the Inon wide angle lens. The first image was 1/500th F4, ISO200. The flash fired, but was turned down too low to make any difference. The second image was 1/125 F2, ISO400. The flash was in manual at something like -3. Unfortunately the manual flash info isn't stored in the XFIF. I always shoot RAW mode underwater since I need the extra lattitude to prevent blowing out the highlights. To bring out the sun rays, I used a combination of a linear curve with multiply, followed with a linear curve with screen, and then an "S" curve for midtone contrast.

The following image was better exposed for the surface detail. You can see the trees and some of the blue sky, but most of the sun rays are gone. Also the posture isn't as good.

This is what I mean about running out of dynamic range. I hope that when I finally get my 5D housed, it will have the range to preserve the highlights and the darks. Also the second image above was shot with ISO400 and is really noisy. It is hard to see at 700x525, but it is really obvious at full resolution.