Key Largo Trip

Recently back from Key Largo, here's a few of my favorite photos. 

Sunballs (from shallow water) are still pretty tough, any tips to reduce the overexposure of the sun and generally improve them are appreciated.

Link to album: https://flickr.com/photos/skeptic14/albums/72157719486875943

Nice pics - the last one especially. Nice grouping!

Sunballs are tough. I'd suggest you need to be pretty shallow (10'- 20') and stop the lens down as much as you can - so with wide angle, f22 - and a high shutter speed. And then turn your strobes up high to light the foreground.

Shooting at noon with the sun high overhead helps too.

Thanks Tim, I appreciate the feedback.

I made sure this trip to bump shutter speed up to 1/500 and stop down to f8 (compact) but clearly I should've stopped down further in hindsight after seeing the sunball exposures from first couple dives.

Any other obvious flaws or areas of improvement you see in these?  I need to improve strobe placement I think for some of the wider foregrounds particularly for verts.

Thanks again

Hi Skeptic 14

The only other thing that strikes me is that the right hand strobe is perhaps set too high in terms of power in pic 3. There’s a lot of reflection off the fish. Pic 5 is a bit the same although that’s even across the image. Maybe worth trying to turn them down a bit. or lower the highlights in, say, Lightroom if you use that?

These are counsels of perfection as I hope you appreciate. As I said, I like the final pic. A good composition and an interesting image. Just slightly over bright highlights. 
 

Yep, saw that in #3 and see it now in #5 in several spots across the school.

I need to incorporate histogram review more vs just relying on a quick check of the tiny display post shot.

I typically only use lightroom for ambient shots, I will occasionally take a RAW and see if the result from LR is different than the jpg. 

My usual flow is photoscape for whitebalance and crop and then PS if there's any nuisance backscatter.

I will see what adjusting highlights in LR results in for #3 and #5, once again appreciate your feedback!

The problem of using a histogram check is the models tend not to sit still whilst you do it. And you then lose that composition that attracted you to the image in the first place. 

Maybe worth taking a whole dive of RAW images and then using LR to adjust highlights - which is quick and easy?

I’ve admittedly been sluggish to expand my use of LR...

Your comment reminded me of the batching capabilities though, so I poked around a bit and might just end up moving more toward LR vs photoscape.

Im a little curious how well general presets will work for all shots from a dive, will have to do some experimenting.

thanks for the suggestion!

No worries. I've been using LR since pretty much its inception and find it terrific for almost all edits plus processing and keyboarding etc. I only switch to PS if I need to edit out a chunk of image which can't be done with cropping - so a stray diver for example.

On presets I tend to have one for Macro and one for WA. They have pretty much the same settings although for WA I turn off the "Enable Profile Corrections" as this makes a mess of fisheye shots.

@TimG really appreciate our conversation, it was the nudge I needed to abandon my antiquated but "trusty" editing sw and process.

I've spent some time playing around with LR and feel like tuning WB, highlights and shadows is much better than photoscape.

Here's 2 of the same starting with the RAW in LR and then another school shot from the trip, they seem better to me at least somewhat.

Thanks again!

My pleasure and thanks for the comment. 

No question that those changes have made a difference.

Good luck with it all.  There's been a bit of criticism in various posts about the cost of the Adobe subscription method. But in terms of what the software can do, it seems a no-brainer to me.