GH4: Cocos Island during 2015 El Nino

This might actually be the right place to share this, so feel free to have a look at the video of my trip to Cocos Island in October. The gear I used is the following:

Panasonic GH4

Panasonic 7-14mm

Nauticam NA-GH4

Nauticam 6" Dome

2 Keldan Luna 4x

Let me know what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0KyjuLri9k

Wow, great job. Love it. Good job GH4 too. Nice to see that Cocos is still banging.

Would you care to share your settings?

Color Profile (adjustments), WB, Focus, ISO?

Great job

Thank you for your kind words!

White balance was mostly fixed to the 5000K of the lights. I started off with a lot of manual white balancing but since most dives were pretty deep anyway there wasn't much of a point for most shots.

I usually shoot at f8 or higher and just have focus locked all the time. I only adjust for very close subjects.

ISO was mostly 400, sometimes 800.

I can't remember the colour profile settings off the top of my head but I'll have a look when I get home on Monday.

Wow, thats some serious feeding frenzy by the sharks :-) Very nice shots!

So here is the colour profile I used:

Natural

-2 contrast

0 sharpness

-5 noise reduction

-2 saturation

0 hue

Been to the Cocos 13 times since 1992 leading many groups. This included going during the big 97/98 El Nino which really drove the large schools of hammers very deep. My guess is that you were in a similar situation with the warmer water. Very nice and appropriate music. From an editors perspective or for competitions, I would add a narration and delete several seconds off the video, especially those areas where the exposure from one but similar clip did not match the next. You have some excellent shots there. The turtles back looked just like that of many of the marble rays you see down there and filming eagle rays has always been a favorite thing to shoot. Good that you got that tiger shark. My guess is that you weren't able to get too close to it.

Nice job.

Thanks for your advice, Steve! I'm still very much of a novice so I really do appreciate it!

The schools of hammers were usually at 20-30m in the blue and sometimes they almost reached the surface. So all in all it wasn't that bad the only downside being that except for one occasion they stayed quite far away so you could just about see them, which obviously isn't great for shooting...

The tiger was maybe 3-5m away from me. The shot could have been a lot better though, but this happened on day 2 when I was still fiddling with the settings quite a lot

I was in fact thinking of taking some of the footage to do something a little more arty for some competitions, but I haven't got around to starting work on that project just yet.