Photos from Little Cayman HUPS Trip - Wideangle

Hi Gang,

Sarah and I just returned from a trip with the Houston Underwater Photo Society to Little Cayman. We had 6 days diving there with reasonable weather (rained most of the time) but great viz underwater.

I decided that for this trip I was going to shoot lots of wideangle and that I was going to follow Craig Jones's recommendation to use complementary filters to improve the color in my images. It worked!!!

Here are a few wideangle photos (kinda big to show the detail):

My impression from working on the photos in CS3 is that the color is a lot richer than when I shoot without filters. It creates a lot more of a "provia" look is how I'd describe it. It also helps control the sunball a LOT better. I did one day's diving w/ the fisheye with no filter and had a lot of "sunball blowouts" - which were not a problem when I used the filter on the lens. With the green filters on the flashes I did have to increase their power to full - but that was OK as I was using Ike DS200's which have a lot of power.

Just for fun, here's a photo of Bloody Bay Wall taken w/ the fisheye - which shows just how dramatic of a drop-off it is. 10m down to 2000m!!

Let me know what you think. I also shot some Macro but I'll post that in a different thread.

If you're interested in seeing the EXIF and the rest of the photos check out my gallery. I've upgraded to Gallery2 and I really like the features:

http://www.reefpix.org/gallery2/v/underwat...yman+HUPS+Trip/

Cheers

James

I'm interested in hearing more about the filter use. More specifics that is. I do see the richness you mention as compared to without.

Cheers

Todd

Hi Todd,

I was lucky enough to be able to take some comparison photos because my wife and I were both using similar rigs. I had a 17mm lens w/ filter and she had the 17-40 w/ no filter. I'll be putting together an article (probably next week) showing some comparison shots and giving more details.

Cheers

James

Hi Gang,

 

My impression from working on the photos in CS3 is that the color is a lot richer than when I shoot without filters. It creates a lot more of a "provia" look is how I'd describe it. http://www.reefpix.org/gallery2/v/underwat...yman+HUPS+Trip/[/url]

 

Just wondering which parameters you were using. It seems to me that you could acheive something quite similar by selecting landscape mode in parameters which boosts the contrast a bit. Or were you shooting in landscape mode already?

Not to steal this thread, I have posted some thoughts/questions on the use of filters in the Image Processing forum.

http://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=19271

James or Andre, do you have any opinion on this?