Feather Star - Loch Crerran, Scotland

Here's what I think was the best of my first shots taken with Canon S40 in WPDC300 housing and YS90DX strobe. Taken mid February in Loch Crerran, near Oban, Scotland. Water temperature was 7 degrees Centigrade, not warm!

It hasn't been modified.

Constructive criticism welcome.

Cheers

Interesting...this was fresh water???

I think that if you adjusted your exposure to provide a darker background, you might have forced the viewers eyes to concentrate more on the subject. I could be biased as where I dive, most of the light in my shots comes strictly from strobes.

Were you using some sort of red filter? There is a definate color cast in your image. I hope you don't mind - I loaded it into photoshop and applied Image>Adjust>Auto Levels, then Edit>Fade Auto Levels and faded by about 12%, then applied a slight crop, and then slightly sharpened the photo under the Filter menu (actually, probably sharpened a little too much).

These options obviously weren't available to you underwater, though I wonder if your white balance setting may have been adjusted to improve on that color cast?

Hope this helps.

Thanks for replying Rob.

It was taken in a sea loch - very sheltered but it is salt water apart from the first couple of metres at the surface which is fresh water run off from the hills. The sea lochs around Oban are great for shore diving in the winter when conditions out to sea are a bit more dodgy.

I wasn't using a filter but you're right about the redness - I wonder if this may be due to my white balance setting of "Flash". I thought that made sense because I was using the strobe but underwater I guess it's all different. I think I'll have to try different white balance settings and shoot in RAW in the future so I can adjust the WB later.

Good advice about the background - I was shooting in P mode so I was just concentrating on getting the autofocus to do its stuff and experiment with the strobe settings. I was happy if it was in focus and reasonably exposed.

I like what you've done with it in Photoshop - it gives it a bit more of a cold, crisp appearance. All this is stuff for me to learn about.

Color filters suck out green. This photo is primarily missing blue and has an abundance of green. Probably the water and I think WB in the camera wouldn't have helped too much. I agree though, the corrected photo is much, much better. Using RAW is a good idea, and a green water filter might help as well.