S. Red Sea

Just back from a family holiday in Coraya Bay, near Marsa Alam, Egypt. Great sunshine and contrast to the lashings of wind and rain the UK's been getting recently. Spent most of the time exploring the house reef freediving. I actually found it a very satisfying way of taking photos- no worrying about boring your buddy. Great for improving the breath-holding and in any case most of the good subjects were shallower than 10m. Had some fun with the Klunzinger's Wrasses, these colourful little fish seemed to get quite aggressive with their own reflections in the port, and so got so close that they made a nice subject among the coral even with a fisheye. All pics with the 5D Mark II in an Ikelite housing. The Green Turtle was at Abu Dabab, which was stuffed with the turtles, although Dennis the Dugong was not in evidence and I even heard rumours he might be deceased.

The rest are here:

http://ferguskennedy.com/?page_id=52&a...&gallery=32

I also shot a load more video on the 5D Mark II and am developing a few more techniques for the video, I'll post some of the video after I've edited it. I actually found out that, as has been mentioned here before, stills with strobes and magic filter in place seem to come out pretty well, allowing me to get some decent stills and video on the same dive. (I only discovered this when I accidentally forgot to remove the filter for a stills dive!). Looking forward to housing the 7D and using that Tok 10-17 for some video...

Hi Fergus!

I really enjoyed diving around Marsa Alam at the beginning of this year. Looking at You'r picture brings back a lot of good memories.

I think the turtle picture You have here is very very good!! The colors and lighting is just stunning - jealous me... Is this with strobes and magic filter?! Strobe and magic filter on last shot as well?! And You took these all whyle snorkeling?! Lots of questions i know

Hopefully Dennis is still OK and the rumours are not true - I was fortunate to see him twice and really enjoyed both dives with him.

Wayting forward for the videos!

Cheers

Karel

Love the turtle shot, if you could share your settings that would be great!

Hi Stephen,

Settings for turtle shot: Camera on manual, strobes on full, 15mm fisheye, f10, 1/125, ISO 200. I find that you can get best results with all on manual, but it does take a bit of forethought, for instance if you're looking to get a shot of the turtle looking up towards the surface you need to up the shutter speed a fair bit to avoid blowing it out. After a while you get used to adjusting the shutter speed to correctly exposed the background as you point the camera in different directions. I did indeed have the magic filter in place, as well as the strobes, and got some quite nice video of the turtles the same day, which I will post. As you can imagine I was pretty close to the turtle.

Here I find another advantage of freediving, in that you can easily go up and down with the turtles as they surface to breathe and you can swim a bit faster to keep up. The turtles of Abu Dabab are completely unbothered by divers, unless they get touched (which is illegal there). I witness some people touching them and that definitely spooked them. The day I was there a Russian snorkeller even grabbed a turtle off the bottom and dragged the strugggling creature to the surface. It was definitely not happy, in fact I wish it had bitten the snorkeller!

Also had some very fleeting encounters with the Spinner Dolphins at Dolphinhouse reef. Managed a few seconds of video.

Cheers

Fergus

Hi Karel,

It's a good area around Marsa, isn't it? Yes, I think I had the filter in place for both the turtle and the last shot. Only thing to remember is that you loose a bit of light with the filter, so you might need to up the ISO slightly.

It's a good area around Marsa, isn't it?

The best part of the Red Sea I have seen so far