Underwater again

I am back from my trip to the Red Sea and I managed to bring back a couple of nice images. My external flash broke before the first dive, I had tested at home and was behaving extrage but still working, and I had to use the camera one.

Again, as last year, the diving conditions were great. The water was warm, 27 degrees, the visibility was great. This time the trip was focused on visiting some sunken ships, most of them quite famous dives.

When I take underwater photographs I use the same approach as on the surface, focus on composition, wait for the perfect moment, use the natural light and combine it with the flash... One of the advantages is that you can shoot at very low speeds, since the water helps to estabilize and avoid sudden camera movements and shake.

Here are some images I managed to process, only fishes today. I will process some from the ships in the next days. I hope you enjoy them.

Big fish

I haven't had any time to shoot new material and I have a huge backlog. Here are some pics of the big fish we saw during our diving safari at the Red Sea. We were a bit unlucky because the water was too warm and there was no current, which means that the big fish do not come to the surface. But we managed to see a couple of interesting ones.

Napoleon
Flash at full power to darken the background and a lot of try an error until I got it in the right place and with the right light.

Hammerheads

Hammerhead close up.
The photo is not sharp and technically quite bad. But it was a great experience. 45m deep and 2m away from this nice guy, just amazing.

Barracuda
Almost on the surface this guy was getting a nice clean up. It still needs some editing to improve the B&W but I wanted to share it.

Oceanic Whitetip Shark

I saw it on the last dive of the trip as I was hanging on the rope for the safety stop. It just swam by, magestic. This guy is one of the few sharks that sometimes, mainly by mistake, kill people.

I think I will do one more post from the underwater pictures, I have some nice ones left from the smaller fish. Stay tuned...

Red

When you are diving the first thing you notice is the lack of the red color. As you go deep the water filters the light and absorbs all the red leaving you in a world where blue is the king. If you are not too deep you can still see some yellow and green, as in the pictures from yesterday. But this changes totally when you add some artificial light to the equation. You just need to shine your torch anywhere and the lost red will come back at its bests. Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about.

Postcards from the deep

I am still sorting the photos from the Red sea, it is hard to pick the less bad ones from the rest. I do not dive enough to get the experience needed for underwater photography and although the G10 is a great little camera it is a bit limited when the light drops (excuses, the problem is just the photographer)

Anyway I think I am happy with some of the results. Here is a first batch to see what you think. All of them are taken with available light, no flash. That means that you get to see the place as I saw it. The amazing colors will come next. The biggest dificulty in this kind of photos, at least for me, was to move as little as possible. The light levels are too low and I tried to keep the ISO at reasonable levels (that is around 1600 or the highest the camera can give to get speeds that I could handhold) Another reason for not moving is that you don't want to shake all the sand from the bottom or you won't make any more pictures in that place.

Well, after so much boring text here are the pictures I hope you like them :-D

From 30 to 10

Back from the 30ºC water of the Red Sea into the 10ºC water of Düsseldorf's rain.

Underwater

Today I had to test my birthday present so we went diving. The sea was quite rough and we got seasick on the way to the dive spot. The water was quite dirty and we could not see much, we had about 5 meter visibility. I didn´t take too many pictures, mainly because we did not see anything interesting, but I am quite happy with the results. I got used quickly to the external flash (Intova ISS 2000) and the G10 was perfect for the job. Next week we will try again and see if the conditions are better. I am really looking for the trip to the Red Sea in October. Until then I hope you like this ones.

Coral

More coral

One of the few fishes we saw today, here you can see how much dirt was floating around.

This one was around 5 cm long

My favourite Mermaid