Oly C-5050 contrast

Hi everyone, my first post here...

I'll be leaving for a week of diving in a few days, and as usual, I've waited until the last minute to brush up on my experience with my underwater camera (my "land" camera is a Canon D60, so the Olympus rarely gets used above the surface).

What I've been noticing with the C-5050 is that photos saved in anything but RAW have far too much contrast. The attached photo shows this - much of the subtle detail in the door is lost when saving in JPEG format. Considering underwater photos consist of a lot of these mid to darker-mid tones, I'm a little uncomfortable with loosing that detail. It's much easier increasing contrast in Photoshop than trying to bring detail back out from those dark areas.

On the camera, I have noise reduction turned off, sharpness and contrast set to -5, and saturation set to 0. Where ever possible, I have the camera set to not process the images (or at least to process them minimally), yet the contrast is clearly bumped up considerably.

I've seen some great photos shot with the 5050, and I'm wondering if everyone shoots in RAW, or if there's some setting I've overlooked.

On a different but related subject, if I end up shooting in RAW, storage capacity will obviously be an issue. I have a 1 gig Microdrive, but have always resisted using it underwater because of the temperature changes. Is this an issue?

Thanks for any advice.

-Chris

Anyone? Surly someone must have some experience with this camera...

I've taken around 5000 shots with one. Most of them underwater and in raw format. Never had a problem. About half of these were onto a 1gig microdrive.

I have been using the 5050 for 5 months underwater most weekends and now only shoot in RAW. The settings I use are sharpness -5, contrast -3 and saturation +2 following information I've found here and elsewhere. I am generally pleased with the initial results but always expect to spend time in PS to produce the image I remember. I use a 512 mb CF and 512 XD in the camera - these give me 69 shots each as RAW, enough so far for a day out. I download onto a Flashtrax 40gb at the end of the day, or could download both cards after a dive if I wanted to take the Flashtrax on site.

hey chris-

I shoot jpeg in SHQ mode with all settings at 0 and use Photoshop to make level, color correction, sharpness changes etc. On my monitor I can not see the detail differences you were referring too.. The write time for me in RAW is too slow. The pictures I took that are at www.scubadiving.com were all taken in JPEG and run through photoshop.

Have fun diving...!

Michael Palasz

Good advice! Shooting in RAW lets you keep shadow detail that would otherwise be clipped to black when the camera makes an 8-bit JPEG. That's one of the main reasons that the JPEG's look more "contrasty." It looks like you understand that pretty well.

I've been using Microdrives underwater for 2 years and have not had a problem with them.

Cheers

James

Your pictures look great, Michael. Thanks for the advice everyone, the Microdrive worked great, and saving in RAW format does preserve a lot of detail. I just got back and am reasonably pleased with the results (considering I'm very new to underwater photography in general). Here's one of my favorites, a sand tiger on the wreck of the Atlas (there were TONS of them).

Next year I have get a bigger strobe (I'm using a Sea and Sea YS 90DX, controlled by Matthias Heinrichs's TTL adapter).

Hey Chris -

Hey Chris nice Sand Tiger! Where is the wreck of the Atlas? I've wanted to shoot some Tigers for awhile now..

M.

Hi Starbuck, sorry for the delay in responding. The Atlas is off the coast of North Carolina. You can see it's location and read more about it here:

www.ncwreckdiving.com/NCWrecks

The sand tigers were great - we could swim up to within 4 feet of them and they'd just ignore us. And if we sat still, they'd swim by within 2 to 3 feet. You can see more photos from the trip and a video of the sharks on the Atlas in the gallery section of www.regionalscuba.com

Thanks,

-Chris