Low light/Ambient Light advice for newbie (pics attached)

Hello all,

Newbie here.

My current setup is a Canon T2i/Aquatica, 8 inch dome , and Tokina 11/16mm. No strobes. Shooting with ambient light. Using Lightroom for post shot work.

I am diving in the Great Lakes and St.Lawrence and shooting mostly wrecks.

I have been shooting in manual, using ISO400, usually a fairly slow shutter speed of 1/15th and usually around f2.8. I also change picture to B&W in lightroom which seems to look alot nicer than the natural greenish. So far so good, but I have had instances that the light has been very low making it difficult.

Two questions:

This may be a very basic newbie question...am I right in assuming that I can move up to an ISO800 and therefore be able to use a faster shutter (to reduce any blurring) and F-stop? By going to a higher ISO , I believe that the picture may get a bit grainer.

Since I do my post production work in Lightroom....does it matter what kind of metering mode I use (ie. evaluative, center weighted, spot, etc)?

Lastly, should I use the peripheral illumination correction feature that sense the lense and corrects for vignetting?

Here are a few photos of my third time dive with the setup.

thanks

Andy

Ontario Canada

Hi Andy,

Given the conditions you are starting to get some decent shots there.

Couple of suggestions and comments.

If you are going black and white in post then bump the iso - Canon cameras have pretty low noise anyhow so try 800 1000, 1600 or more. You will get more noise (not grain) but it is much easier to deal with in B&W.

At some point try the Nik software Black and White plug in - SilverFXPro. There is a free trial version.

F2.8 is way wide - even with a fisheye you are inviting low depth of field, Also the dome will tend toward corner issues until say F8. So aim for F8 as a minimum if you can.

If you can get the camera solid - wedge yourself in wreck - hold the housing on wreckage then long exposure (long shutter speeds ) work great - if you can take a tripod and some extra weight to hold it down then shutter speeds of several seconds can be used.

Tripods in the water are a major pain in the rear but if you can find a mate dumb enough to carry it for you then they can work. Most of my mates now decline the opportunity to Sherpa for me.

Metering - tend not to trust meters in the water - they get confused more so with long exposure times. Figure out how to view the histogram display on the camera and review that in the water.

Shoot manual mode (it is pretty easy) and shoot a number of exposures until you are confident that one of them is good, some will fail for movement, some for exposure so take lots of shots.

Manual mode & histogram review is the way to go - it is pretty simple to get to grips with on land and then take that experience into the water - you will get a step function in improvement with this alone.

Paul C

Looks good so far,

I must agree on the advice on Manual mode and then review and adjust exposure iteratively. And use histogram too as it is easy to be tricked by the quality of the review-image on the camera. This works especially well when you don't have a model in the picture as here. It's just to fire away for as long as you need.

I'm curious on the corner sharpness of your setup, Tokina 11-16 at open apertures. I've been eying that setup myself with the purpose to catch as much light as possible in the same conditions. It doesn't look too bad in your photos, but it's hard to tell at this resolution and these forgiving motives. What is the usefull limit in aperture? Is the 8" dome big enough for the wide end?

Cheers

/O

Paul and Oskar,

Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it very much.

This site has been excellent because of the comments from members like yourselves to beginners like me.

I think I have been very lucky with the shots that I have so far. I am also fortunate that all of these wrecks are literally on my doorstep, so I can jump in the water and try things out anytime. Practice will be key.

I am going out today and will bump up the ISO to see what I can get.

The tripod idea is something I am going to try. I looking for a low cost tripod that I can specifically use for the setup.

Still cannot figure out the review function on the T2i. I always get an "exp sim" warning message when taking low light photos. So I have just disabled the screen review completely.

I should mention that I also have the Aquatica viewfinder on my setup which I like very much.

Oskar, in regards to the your question concerning aperature. probably the best way for me to answer is to send you a link to a number of my photos and you can see the metadata associated with it. Like I said I am a relative newbie in this .

Thanks again guys.

Andy