Couple of macro clips from Lembeh

Thought I would catch up on some posting and put my last couple of short macro clips up...

The first critter: you would probably swim over the top of one of these small sand-covered conch and never give them a second glance...

..but if you did, and they were hungry, you would get to see this wonderful and surprising trunk-like appendage swaying around, looking for a good meal!! They also have beautiful eyes and goes to show why moving slowly and looking at everything is so important when you are 'muck' diving in Lembeh, as so much is worth a second look

[vimeohd]33098802[/vimeohd]

The second: Have you every wondered what Box Crabs eat?? Well, maybe, like me, you haven't, but I did find out this week.

Box Crabs usually spend their time buried in the sand, with just the tips of their eyes exposed. I caught this one out and about, and was lucky enough to see it just after it had caught a clam.

Clams have pretty tough shells, so it was amazing to watch this Box Crab literally rip the clam to pieces to get at the soft orange flesh inside. The crab doesn't hang around, slowly savouring it's lunch, but quickly devours it then scoots off to bury itself once again, before something else tries to eat it!!

[vimeohd]33507903[/vimeohd]

As alawys... a treat to watch. And a reminder to slow down and really pay attention. So much to see.

Thanks for sharing - DiverPam

Amazing!!!!

Some great behaviours caught there. You are building quite a library of unique footage!

I really enjoy your videos Kaj, but I think your footage would benefit if you could get the colour temperature of your lights closer to the colour temperature of the ambient sunlight, as your artificially-lit subjects often look rather red, while the background is rather green-blue. I do this by snapping discs of #281 "3/4 blue" lighting gel into the front of my Light & Motion halogen light heads. Gels come from companies like Lee Filters or Rosco. It does reduce the intensity of the light a little though, which can be a challenge since the halogen lights aren't so bright anyway.

Another option is to colour-correct in post. I don't know what software you are using, but in Sony Vegas Pro you could reduce the red of your subjects with the secondary color correction filter, while leaving the green background untouched (by masking according to hue, saturation etc.). You could also increase the red of the background by applying an additional secondary color correction filter. It's hard work but worth it for special clips.

Of course it's best to get the colours as close as possible when you shoot. Are you using auto-white balance? Maybe think about manually white balancing on a slate etc.?

Just friendly suggestions. The clips are awesome anyway!

As always, thanks for the comments

Nick, thanks for the advise. I do manually balance all my shots off a white slate before shooting. I do not do any post colour correction at the moment, mainly because I don't have the time at this stage. I can't afford to take too long as 'work' does not allow me much time for editing. I fully plan, when I do get the time, to colour correct in post and produce something more than clips a couple of minutes long.

The green hue sometimes part of the subjects is caused by the shadows from the two L&M 1200 LED Sunrays I use. The extreme macro shots can really enhance the small pockets of shadows that even with two can can be impossible to eliminate. The green sand is there as it's out of the light zone and I've white balanced off the lights. It's frustrating for me. Would the 3/4 blue lighting gel work with LEDs. I imagine I would need a different colour as the LEDs and halogen are very different in temperature. I wonder if a lot of the difference you see in my clips are due to this, that you are used to seeing a softer halogen light compared to my harsher LEDs?

Still, one day I hope to have the time to really sit down and edit. I use CS5.5 and have Colorista II, so I'm hoping that will help a lot.

Cheers,

Kaj

The 3/4 blue lighting gel discs are definitely a solution for the warmer light of halogen lights, and not really for LEDs, although I suppose it could be if the LEDs were of a similar colour temperature.

I'm surprised to hear that you are manually white-balancing with your lights on, because the footage really doesn't look like that. What camera is it? Are you using a white slate and are you holding it at a similar range from the camera that the subjects are at? Maybe have a play around with white balancing off something pinkish or, in view of your footage, something orangey-pinkish (technical term). I MWB off the palm of my hand in daylight, but to be honest at night auto white balance has usually done well for me. With my old VX2000 I used to white balance off my fins which I covered with white duct tape scrawled with red permanent marker blurred with solvent, but in hindsight the footage was still usually too red.

I have a Sony XR500. For every shot I have a white slate that I hold up about a foot away from the lens with the lights on the slate. I'm always using a macro lens so this is the same distance as my subjects. My lights are on 1/4 power as I'm always so close to the subject. To me the lit subject I see with my lights looks the same as I see it afterwards on my screen. The only real problem I see is from my shadows (green) or very green sand out of the subject area (where the light from the LEDs doesn't hit).

I just had another critical look at the two clips in this post and both, to me, look exactly right. The colours seem true, the red seems right, there is hardly any green shadow, maybe a little on the left (as you are looking at it) claw of the Box Crab. Maybe I'm just used to seeing these critters with my lights. I'm looking at the clips before uploading them to Vimeo. Maybe Vimeo is doing something to them. I'll try to look, but my internet speed can make it a long process.

I find when I watch guests clips, who have been shooting here with halogens, that their shots look, to me, too warm. There is obviously a big difference between these lights and maybe this makes a big difference in the way we perceive our footage? Hmmm.... things for me to think about.....

Of course there is the age-old debate about whether to make subjects look the same as if they were lifted to the surface, or whether to leave them with an underwater blueish or greenish hue, and there is no right or wrong on that issue... just taste. Over the years I've tended to make my stuff bluer or greener than in the past, but often it's still "warmer" than what you usually see in top dollar documentaries.

Would you mind if I dig one or two of your videos out of my browser cache (after playing on Vimeo), and play around with colour correction and scopes in Vegas Pro next to some of my own similar Lembeh footage? Of course I wouldn't upload them anywhere but could send you back my results, or upload stills or a couple of seconds if you like. Would be interesting to see what colour temperature others prefer too. I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to do this but it would be an interesting exercise. I can see already that, in the case of the box crab, the difference in colour temp between your artificial lights and the surrounding ambient filtered sunlight would present quite a challenge in grading.

Of course there is the age-old debate about whether to make subjects look the same as if they were lifted to the surface, or whether to leave them with an underwater blueish or greenish hue, and there is no right or wrong on that issue... just taste. Over the years I've tended to make my stuff bluer or greener than in the past, but often it's still "warmer" than what you usually see in top dollar documentaries.

 

Would you mind if I dig one or two of your videos out of my browser cache (after playing on Vimeo), and play around with colour correction and scopes in Vegas Pro next to some of my own similar Lembeh footage? Of course I wouldn't upload them anywhere but could send you back my results, or upload stills or a couple of seconds if you like. Would be interesting to see what colour temperature others prefer too. I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to do this but it would be an interesting exercise. I can see already that, in the case of the box crab, the difference in colour temp between your artificial lights and the surrounding ambient filtered sunlight would present quite a challenge in grading.

Please Nick, go ahead. Let me know if you have any difficulty getting the files. If you do let me know and I can upload them elsewhere for you to have a play around with. I'd be very interested to see your results.

liquidguru, I checked out the box crab file against my scopes in Sony Vegas Pro. I don't know if you have these same scopes in CS5.5 or Colorista.

Assuming your software and Vimeo's encoder have not affected the general luminance of the footage, your camera appears to have shot approximately levels 25 to 255 on a scale of 0 to 255. There is some noise below the 25. Anything outside of 16-235 gets clipped on playback by the Adobe Flash Player, as it "expands" or "maps" 16-235 out to 0-255, so you're losing any highlight detail between 235 and 255. You're also not going to get any true blacks even in the deepest shadows. I'm seeing this chiefly on the Vegas histogram, but also the waveform scope.

So to start with I put on a color correction curve that pulls all 3 RGB channels down from 255 to 235, and which darkens the blacks by 7 clicks (but you could go as far as 9 clicks). In Vegas I move the anchors (tangency point) around by pressing the arrow keys, which give move the points one unit at a time.

On the vectorscope (as well as my eyes, and the RGB parade) I'm also seeing that the whole hue is over to the yellow side. So I separated out the RGB curves and, mainly towards the bright end, I reduced the red and increased the blue, and to my eyes this gives a more natural looking overall balance.

If you upload a file with this luminance adjustment to Vimeo or YouTube, the levels should get correctly "expanded" out to nominally 0-255 by the Adobe Flash Player on web playback, exactly how a TV "expands" broadcast-safe levels on a DVD. See this article for more info. So the result should be less lossy than what you're doing now.

If you wanted to perfect this grade you would probably want to add a secondary color corrector to either shift the background away from green, or to shift the hue of the crab itself away from red. It's impossible to do it all with just one color curves fx on a clip such as this. However I think the single color curves fx give an improvement to the crab without making the background significantly more green. A second fx shouldn't be required for the snail, which doesn't have the different background hue.

Ideally you would also probably want to keyframe any fx (i.e. change them over time as necessary), as your black point does look like it's wandering (perhaps due to auto exposure?).

If your time is limited, I think you could come up with a single fx preset or an fx chain preset that is more or less right for grading the majority of your footage, then it would hardly take you any time to apply.

I could post or email you a screenshot, but you should be able to approximate what I've done using the tools you have.

I hope this is useful!

Thanks for the very detailed reply. I will try to play around with this a little tomorrow and see what I can come up with. I appreciate the time you've put into this.

Please feel free to post a screenshot of the changes you made, as it will help me visualise a little more what you are saying. Auto-exposure may have something to do with it. Recently I've been manually setting the exposure to try and get more consistent background colour and to avoid whites blowing out on wider shots. Auto-exposure was used in both these two clips.

Cheers,

Kaj