On 3/6/2021 at 1:56 PM, gobiodon said:Colours, filters, external light sources
Besides producing stable footages it’s also important to have nice vibrant colours and it’s a bit more complicated. The cheapest solution is to stay shallow and get close to your subject. In many cases I leave my cameras on a spot I expect fish traffic in the relatively shallow water. Many cases I just wear a chest wader mainly used for angling and I place the cameras with the help of a “reacher grabber tool” mainly used by old people. It’s very useful in cold water.
It’s also important to camouflage your camera somehow. I observed filming parallel with a grey GoPro and the Yi4K in a white housing that the fish avoided the white object.
So I painted all of my plastic camera housings (I stole some nail paint from my daughter). Black or dark green works well. The only problem is that sometimes it’s also difficult to find them.
I tried only cheap filters and I was not that happy with the results. It cuts lots of lights so the shots are noisier and the colours are way off in the shallow. Good quality filters are expensive and the topic of this thread is low-budget videography. I would rather spend my money on a cheap light instead of an expensive filter. But maybe you have a different opinion.
My first underwater video light was a Evolva Future Technology D02 (40-50 Euro, 900 Lumen). You can skip this level. It doesn’t bring much, maybe a bit of kiss of lights on the fish but it’s way to weak.
My second light was Weefine Smart Focus 6000. I actually spent the voucher from my actioncup first prize on it. I think is a really good video light for the money (you can buy it between 540 and 600 euro. It has 6000 lumen, 90 degree (underwater), and colour temperature of 5000 Kelvin, cri (colour rendering index) = ra80. Light output is adjustable; you can add an optical condenser, so it’s perfect also for macro and close-up videography. But it’s not cheap.
There are cheaper lights from China and I saw many divers use them, at least in Germany. There are many versions of these sub 100 Euro video lights and honestly, they’re not that bad. I also bought one. So now I have 3 different lights. It’s absolutely not recommended. Actually for my videography, the best would be a second Weefine, and in general the best way is to use two identical lights.
Back to these cheap video lights. The light output is really good, not the claimed over 10K lumen but surely above 5-6K. The only thing is that the colour temperature is much colder (and probably the CRI is low). However, if you want to do wide angle videography, maybe it’s not a bad choice to use two of these cheap but powerful lights (the video light on the left).
I have used the cheap Chinese lamps for a a while now, and had fair results, I have tried adding warming gels to them (added a minus green to correct a green cast) all work well. I also use ambient filters with them.
Have a look at my article and you can see what I've been doing. All low budget.
