Newbe at u/w and with S2, at Roatan

I hope the attachment isn't too big. I would be grateful for any constructive comments from anyone in this highly impressive group to help me improve on these first attempts. One has to start somewhere!

Gloria

Hi Gloria, welcome to Wetpixel!

Can you tell us your aperture, shutter speed, etc? That will help us with exposure questions.

I like the way this shot really presents the fish's "expression" of righteous indignation.

To my eye, it is about a half stop overexposed - but very close. I'm judging from the shadows that you used two strobes? Were they set at TTL?

Focus is good because it's on the fish's eye. Composition could be improved by either moving in tighter, or out a bit. The fish is "boxed in" by the frame a little, and its fin is also cut off.

Great first attempt at a difficult subject! Let's see some more.

Sincerely,

James Wiseman

James,

First of all I have to say big thanks to you and Eric and the regulars here -- I 've been a regular reader and researcher of this web site all the while picking out my first digital camera and my first housing, strobe, etc. I don't believe I could have made all those decisions on a subject I knew nothing about with any confidence without the help of the sages on this website. Yea for the internet. I know it will be a while till I can get photos really worthy of even posting here, but then as I said, if you all have a little patience, one needs to start somewhere.

Re the photo, thanks for exactly the sort of feedback I was hoping for.

This photo was at 1/60 and aperture at 5.6, ISO 100, TTL. At this point I have only a 60mm macro and one YS120 strobe. The original from which I cropped this does have the whole fin so I can "pull out" some to take that in.

I do have a few other pix from that trip I'd like comments on, however, I am having big problems getting them under the 75 kb limit. I tried using the adobe resize wizard, making them low resolution with only 200-300 pixels on longest side, and still they are over 100 kb. Whats the trick for getting them small enough for posting w/o ruining them? (Eventually I'll figure out the link thing, but 'till then...

Gloria

Gloria,

This is a great start, certainly a lot better than the garbage I got on my first few outings.

My only suggestion would be to decrease the aperture a bit, maybe to f/8 or f/11. The mouth looks like it is on the fringe of the depth of field, so slightly blurred. A smaller aperture would probably correct that. That being said, this is just being picky, this is a great start.

On the image size, try reducing the quality of the JPG from Maximum to something aroun 50-60%. At this size it won't be too noticeable, or shouldn't be.

Tom

This is is at F11, 1/125, maybe not yet perfect but better depth of field?

Gloria

Hi Gloria,

For photos where you want good constructive feedback, try the Image Improvement Forum. Post only one photo per thread and we will give you the same type of feedback.

Sorry about the attachment size limit. Just think about if we have 1,000 photos here (easy to do) at 100kb each. That's 10 megabytes! :-)

Cheers

James

James,

Thanks, when I figure out how to do this I will use the improvement section. No apologies needed re size limit as I understand its reasons-- just am on up side of a learning curve getting there. Even 400 pixels on long side, screen resolution of 72/inch, medium-low resolution doesn't seem to do it for most of the photos. I haven't figured out what else I need to do yet.

Gloria

[smart aleck ON] ...maybe more like 100MB... [smart aleck OFF]

Error exists between keyboard and chair (EEBKAC)

I meant to type 100 but 10 came out. Heck, I told some guy the other day that we would be pumping 900 degree water through his pipeline - lol!

Cheers

James