South Maldives, February 2014

Hi,

Just finished editing my last divetrip to the Maldives.

First time taking my bmcc underwater. It was an interesting experience!

Enjoy! comments and critique welcome

https://vimeo.com/96906148

Very nice

thanks Pete!

hj nihal

nicely graded. finally get to see the whole thing. great to see so many variety of marine life in the Maldives.

those extended battery things are ready so pop by anytime.

cheers

david

Nice job. What are your thoughts on the BMCC?

Awesome, thanks David! I'll try to drop by on Saturday.

Well I was using an RX100 before so this was a big step to a much bigger rig. Definitely a huge change and it took me a few days diving with the rig before I started to feel halfway comfortable with the BMCC underwater. Everything is fully manual - focus, iris, iso and zoom - (setting the iris via the auto iris button worked surprisingly well though). A lot of task loading, but I can't say I mind having to focus manually since I'm a control freak in that sense

The BMCC is a very bare-bone camera but I love the image coming out of it and shooting raw video just gives me so much more options in post. Grading wise I still have a lot to learn and I think one can push the camera a lot further than I have.

I was worried in the beginning about low light performance but actually ended up most of the time shooting at ISO 400 or 200 to be able to get the lens down to around f4 to f12 depending on the depth, which I think is pretty good. Everything was shot with a 108 degree shutter to avoid motion blur problems when stabilizing - ( that's already 1 stop(?) less in light).

My biggest issues was actually the screen - which is horrible and it's already difficult to judge focus on it on land, underwater it was an even bigger problem. Lost a few shots because of that. But I just got the smallHD dp4 - that'll hopefully help.

It is a more complicated workflow since you have to deal with a lot of data - (I had 3x 480GB SSD's and 2x 3TB harddrives for backup with me. 1 week of Maldives accumulated roughly 2.2TB of data, which was perfect to backup on both disks. One disk crashed when I was still in the Maldives and I almost lost some dives because I hadn't backed those on both drives yet, but I managed to recover the data in the end.

I think the results from the BMCC are rewarding enough though and I don't mind the extra work of grading and data management.

My next big trip is to Tonga end of July - where I'll be able to use the smallHD together with the BMCC and hopefully get some nice shots of the humpback whales.

Awesome! Nice Dynamic arc. I really loved the Nurse shark and clown fish sections!