Egyptian Experiments

I'm just back from a great week in the Red Sea. After several serious trips producing the images for my Art of Diving project it was wonderful to go away with friends for 5 and 1/2 days of relaxed deliverable free diving. The aim of my trip was to test and refine new techniques. So these are not my most polished pix - but include some new ideas.

http://www.amustard.com/RS05/

I did a lot of filter photography. Including the two black and white filters mentioned in a separate thread. And lots of trials with my new Magic filter for colour photography. It produced great stuff from the surface down to 15m (and everyone who tried it got better results than I did, grrr!). Check out the dolphins (surface) and blue spotted ray (bang on 15m) in the gallery. The magic filter was still pretty reasonable to 20m (the depth of the wreck). I also tried my new face-mask filter, although this will require a few mods to be working properly!

I also did several dives with my telephoto setup - which is very ungainly with my heavy subtronics on long arms out in front of my housing! But it does produce very different images. Here is the rig folded up on the boat.

Apart from that I continued with my current trend of shooting fish with clean blue backgrounds, and bashed on with my fish mating photography. I was very pleased to get a shot of lionfish mating (although annoyingly it lacks eye contact). The schools (and viz) at Ras Mohammed were not as cooperative this year as they were last year - and since I got such nice pix last year I didn't do much with them.

Alex

WOW Alex

The snappers tele photos are exelent I like that DOF

Blue, like always, is perfect. Your speciality.

Other favorites are:

Snappers_1

Fish_Face1

What colors detail and sharpness. how you doit it? I dont think that this is only a product off a high megapixel camera with a very sharp lens.

Is there any photos with available light and the kodak gel filters?

What lenses have u use in Red Sea?

Again great work.

Please, please be my UW Photo teacher :-)

Nice work Alex, love the Tele shots, refreshingly novel, the wrecks are sweets also

Another fine collection.

Awesome shots as usual!

Mating Lions.... that is wrong on so many levels!

My favourites are still the WA's dripping with dendronepthya, but the I love the snappers and other fish portrait work. You're depth of work is inspiring.

Love to hear more about this Magic filter. I can see the tagline now... "Get your Mustard Magic Filter today and you too can have photographs like these..."

I haven't commented in the other B&Ws thread, but I really like the look of them. The tonal range and depth is superb.

What's with that "mask filter" that's really cool.

Damn it, I'd like to have something to critique...

Beautiful shots! The magic filter is fantastic. Having just taken a few dolphin shots near the surface myself, I'm really impressed with difference.

That's great color and contrast Alex, when can we order? :)

The blue background on the butterflyfish shot is awesome. All mating shots are really great!

Great stuff, Alex! The snapper_1 is my favorite, as well as the not so mutant Ninja turtle....aiii ya! Take that, you pesky diver!

Cheers,

Marli

Alex get back here .... i'm getting bored

Thumbnails look good, (my connection too slow to open them)

Nice experiments, things looking good.

The anthias in the post above, telephoto technique or regular 105?

Great colour!

Mike

The Red Sea is such an awesome photo studio. And it gets better and better as I get to know the sites better each year. The group I go with are truely old school. Many have been going to Sinai since the 1970s. Next summer I am almost certainly going to run an Advanced Digital photo workshop there for UWP Magazine - to do the wrecks, reefs and schools.

Anyway, the Magic Filter is still a secret recipe because we are looking into manufacturing and selling them. It takes a slightly different approach from other filters, which gives it the wide operating depth range.

The mask filter - diver's point of view - is just a facemask on the domeport. Next time I will use a more suitable mask! See attached picture.

At the moment I use the 105mm (160mm equivlent on FF) as my telephoto lens. I am looking at getting the Sigma 150mm for this role soon. Anyway this means that there is an overlap between what is a macro shot and what is a telephoto. For me a telephoto shot is of a bigger area, and is shot in balance light (blue background), with an open aperture. Because of the long camera to subject distance I tend to have the strobes out in front of the lens.

The anthias is somewhere inbetween. Shot like a telephoto, but of a typically macro picture area.

Alex

p.s. as always thanks for the comments. It is very interesing to read them. Snapper_1, which a couple of you single out is one of my least favourites of the selection.

Yep, can definitely see your Red Sea stuff improving every time you go there as well.

Was wondering about the Anthias shot as i have something similar but i think you must have been a lot closer to fill the frame more and get that saturation (or else that is one HUGE anthias...)

Looking forward to hearing more about the filter...man i wish this place had a camera store

Mike

p.s. as always thanks for the comments. It is very interesing to read them. Snapper_1, which a couple of you single out is one of my least favourites of the selection.

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Alex, your snapper shot from this year is great, but I think last year's shot is a lot better.

Also, don't forget to give us more detail on that workshop next year, I've never been to the Red Sea, and this would be a great opportunity.

Alex, your snapper shot from this year is great, but I think last year's shot is a lot better.

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I agree. My two favourite snapper shots from last year are head and shoulders above this years. A lot of that was down to conditions this year. There wasn't any proper current at Ras Mohammed on any of the 6 dives we did there - and this meant the schools were a bit dispersed. Plus when the viz was good there was a big bloom of salps in that water mass. And seeing these difficulties and knowing what I have in the bag I didn't do too much with the snappers.

http://www.amustard.com/aod/images/08_calendar_00.jpg

http://www.amustard.com/aod/images/01_why_07.jpg

Hopefully we will have all the details sorted soon for next year's Red Sea workshop.

Alex

Alex, sorry but didn't really answer the question like i was hoping. How close was the anthias?

I really love that blue and the detail is stunning, i keep coming back to look at it...

Mike, it's an Anthias, it's shot with the 105mm and it's uncropped! I never looked at it without the lens - but I guess it was about 30cm away. I remember that it wasn't a big anthias - because I was annoyed when I made it to the next coral head and found much bigger individuals.

My D2x has pretty special AF - which is why I can take on a shot like this - moving fish close to lens. I also took about 50 others - most of which were deleted UW!

The blue of the water was stunning that morning and I just spent the dive swimming round looking for things to plonk in front of it. The D2x does blue very nicely - although I would say that the blues can get a bit over saturated (like Velvia) when shooting in JPG (Abobe 1998 III). The D70 does seem to produce slightly more cyany light blues, IMO.

The main challenge was to get a shot without the other anthias in the background - with the camera at the right angle to keep the blue nice.

Alex

p.s. If you like that shot you may like this one too (its an especially small 13 kB for you, Mike). Most people on the boat preferred this one - they are wrong of course, the other one is nicer! Plus I attach a 100% crop from it. For info (this is not compressed as much).

You're right, the first one is better. And that 13K openen in less than a minute!

That crop is sharp! I want that camera...

Trying to get shots without anthias in the background, from seeing your reef shots it looks like that would be one hell of a tough assignment, anthias all over the shop.

Alex' the shot of the Giannis D. is amazing what lens did you use?

Its my favorite wreck in the Abu Nuhas area.

Did you dove at the Rosalie Muller? its a deep and not easy dive but the wreck is full of life.

Alex' the shot of the Giannis D. is amazing what lens did you use?

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Thanks Ilan. Its is shot with the 10.5mm fisheye. Need a wide one for this wreck, as I am sure that you know.

That's certainly a shot that appeals to people who know the wreck. For those who don't, the stern is too large to shoot with flash - so everyone has to shoot it in available light. Which meant that everyone's images looked like this:

Taken in June 2001 with F100 + 16mm on film.

When digital came along - filters meant we could shoot large areas in colour. The problem here was that I couldn't use a UR Pro filter because they don't fit on fisheyes! And no other lens is wide enough - even a 15mm or 16mm FE isn't wide enough for this shot on a cropped sensor DSLR. That's where my new filter comes in. Suddenly I can have the Giannis in colour. You see, magic:

Taken in June 2005 with D2x + 10.5mm with Magic Filter.

Alex