kona underwater with G2/Ikelite

Just loaded up a bunch more pics, from my first few weeks of shooting with the G2 underwater.

Comments and criticism sought!

Thanks,

Don

These are absolutely superb shots, Don! Very crisp pictures, even for difficult subjects.

What kind of lighting did you use? Also, did you enhance the color on some shots afterwards, or did you rely on the G2's built-in capabilities only?

Hi Frank.

Thanks for the nice comments.

I tried, for about 1 day, to use the built in flash alone, with the diffuser which Ikelite provides as part of the housing package.

It worked ok for things very, very close, (like the decoy scorpian), and wasn't nearly powerful enough for anything further away.

The rest of the time, I was using the ikelite ds-50, with their optical slave unit. Works great, and supports all digital and non digital cameras alike, with true compatible strobe control from the camera.

The shark shots, and ray shots were all natural light.

The colors are mostly not enhanced - just contrast adjusted.

A few of them, (the upclose racoons), I did "auto adjust levels" in photoshop, and if the result was good, kept it.

I shot them all in raw mode, and converted them with auto white balance, normal saturation, low contrast, and low sharpening, to 16 bit tiffs, and then brought them into Photoshop for contrast and level adjustment.

The only one where I really had to work, was "sharkNfriend", because the brightly focused sunlight, due to the water surface, overexposed her legs, and washed them out.

I found a cool photoshop plugin, called icorrect, which allowed me to fix it up in a few clicks!

Enjoy.

Don