Lion Fish

Me and Kel went out last night and nailed this friendly chappy

4 megs

Yeh yeh I know I have a heap of emails to reply to....getting there .

EDIT:

And here is a larger FLASH FULL SCREEN One. 12 megs.

Nice. No wonder he was friendly, you were helping him find food.

Very cool

Alex

That was lovely wags..

All done on Edius i presume...

Am i right that they are also called 'Turkey fish' in some countries ????

If not please ignore my comments.

Dive safe

DeanB

Nice wags! really made me want to dive. i was half expecting the full zoom on the jaws sinking into a little fish...'all with the same lens'... The music was nice and relaxing as well...good show mate!

Yes I wished I shot it on a higher shutter speed but ya get that. <_<

Going out again tonight so if we come across him again will spin up to 100 or something.

Most of that was shot one handed hanging onto the top center grab arm and using my right hand to zoom in with the vary zoom wheel while looking into the LCD.

It is quite amazing that you zoom in from a distance and the camera gets to a point where it cannot focus anymore, flip the macro up and away in you go getting a much further/tighter shot. I'll shoot some demos of what I mean tonight.

Turkey fish? HUH.. have not heard of that before.

That was lovely wags..

 

Am i right that they are also called 'Turkey fish' in some countries ????

You are right, the Common Lionfish is sometimes known as a Turkey fish (Pterois volitans) - I am not sure if this is an old name or just an alternative. Some books also call the Clearfin Lionfish a Turkeyfish.

Roger

Yes I wished I shot it on a higher shutter speed but ya get that. <_<

Wagsy,

Did you count the frames. I took a similar feeding sequence in DV (PAL 25fps) and it took just 3 frames from start to finish! I started to feel a bit sorry for the little fish my lights were picking up for the lionfish. It must have eaten 10-12 before I stopped filming!

Roger

WOW what a wild dive.

There we were out in the RIB in the dark while thunder & lightning all around us as we were in the middle of a rain storm in the pitch black.....could not even see the lights of town...so we thought...mmm could be abit tricky as we don't use a GPS...any how it eased off and we got back, but only got about 7 minutes of footage.

Here is the same guy shot at 100 Shutter...yep it only takes a few frames and it's all over. Amazing how quick they are Roger and yes I think he ended up with a belly full of fish.

FLASH CLIP HERE 1.3mbps

Looks like he's a bit of a novice..

Either that Or he's blinded by the lights...?

Dive safe

DeanB

Wagsy - gain setup/shutter speed? It looks great. Really great.

To get fish strikes like scorpion fish or frog fish in slo mo. The best way with the Z/FX1 is to get as crisp a shot of the strike by using higher shutter speed. But depending on your light source, you will get strobic effects so the normal movement will look a bit strobic like that. I'd use maybe about 1/600 or above to get a crisp look. Then the NLE can interpolate the other frames much better than with a blurry shot.

Another way is to over crank with cameras like the HVX200 (60fps at 720P= 1/2x motion) or the Sony camcorders with the Super Slomo (120 frames per second/240 fields per second) feature. The limitation of the Sonys are that it's in bursts of up to 12 secs (HVR-V1) so the subject may not perform during that time.

Of course, there's always the 1000fps Phantom HD Eric Cheng will buy soon.

Yeh he had a few misses there, bummer we had to get out of there but it was getting way too out of control.

50 shutter, 3db, and auto exposure at it was constanly moving around.

Second night was 100 shutter but the water was worse.

Drew I would need more lights to go higher I think.

I suppose if we had tons of money we could go out and buy the best but we don't so one can only work with the tools one can afford.

And yep Ive seen guys with over $100,000 US setups and they shoot *&^%. Anyone want to give us a F900 and a Amphibicam

I can remember a sequence I shot of a similar event in Yap. At the time I was using the trusted VX1000 with twin 50w Halogens. I had cranked the shutter to 1/1000th and filmed using a +4 diopter as a Lionfish hit a silverside. When I slowed down the footage and flicked through it one frame at a time I could see (albeit very blurred) at the point of ingestion, the head of the silverside inside the Lionfish mouth. When I slowed down the speed for video it lost some of the sharpness but the viewer could clearly see the action. Pretty gory stuff, but nature nonetheless. OK so the Lionfish had adapted the situation to his benefit but that is what most predators would do I guess.

Cheers,

Mark.

Well done mate! <_<

Wags I really like the first one. Very classy. Were you using your Phenom with your Darkbuster lights?

If I shoot lionfish at night in auto exposure the white bits of the fish usually blow out completely. Were you stepped down somehow?

I sure was with cut out plastic plates as diffusers which gives a very wide even white light.

Nick you are indeed correct and thats why it's good to have a housing where you can knock back the exposure abit but for shots like that you have to leave it on auto as the subject is always moving around the place.

Once in EDIUS I kicked back the brightness abit as the white bits were indeed over 100 in the vectorscope.

How do you knock back the exposure on the Phenom when you're in auto? AE Override via an assign button or with a picture profile or....?

Also how do you have your AE Response set? I find FAST gives too much "pumping" whereas SLOW doesn't react quick enough so I have mine on MIDDLE.

Wags, come on man... I mean 4megs, I'm in Indonesia and seem to be missing all this action due to my mega slow connection speed. Can't you put it up a bit smaller for those of us who have crappy lines. I'm sure Mike would like to view these as well hey?

What 4 megs still to big for you?

I'll render out a tiny one for you and Mike.

Nick it was on auto exposure and yes the AE response is set middle, db locked to 0 or 3 max with the shutter on 50.

One thing that helps is having a even spread of light, no hot spots and you don't want them too bright. I can be like 1 meter away from a wall on full wide and the lights will still fill the whole frame evenly. During the day however you want ones that push the beams out further so less diffusion needed.