G11 Newbie - Some questions about the settings

[Padi Diver]

Good evening / morning.
I am a newbie to Canon G11, I used to use my friends cameras while diving (Sony Cybershots) but not anymore.

I got the Canon G11 along with the WP-DC34 housing for it. As I said earlier, I have no experience with Canon cameras.
At first, I changed little simple settings like setting the red detection option to on, setting the time, etc.

I would like to know for underwater, should I just use the Underwater option in the camera ort it’s better to set my own settings manually?

If manually, what are the best settings for underwater?
If it differs or what I mean to say can’t always be the same settings, then what settings should I change and based on what?

I got confused reading the manual as I felt that there are a lot of things that I don’t understand.

Help is appreciated and thanks in advance.
The Padi Diver

 

[PatW]

It depends.

If you are using a flash, you may want to use "Auto" white balance. The in camera strobe will work with the housing, but it has drawbacks. Since the in camera strobe is very close to the lense, any particles in the water will get lit up and show up on your photos as backscatter.

A seperate strobe will give you far better results than the in camera strobe. But it costs more to have one.

If you have enough memory on your memory cards, you can just shoot in RAW and correct the white balance in post processing.

If you are not using a strobe, the underwater setting will help. But it is a one size fits all. As you go deeper, the light gets more dominated by blue. You lose red light completely even in shallow water like 15'. The only way to get the red back is to use a strobe. When you get down to 80', all of the light is green or blue.

You could take a white card whilst you are diving and do a custom white balance when you change depth significantly. That way your jpegs will be properly white balanced.

Let me assume that you are not using the camera flash or an external strobe. You are also not using RAW. In that case, you might as well set it on "underwater" and hope for the best.

 

[Padi Diver]

Hello PatW,
Thanks for your assistance.

Regarding the flash and the strobe, I don’t use any external strobe, and the flash is set to automatic in the camera.

Does this make any difference?
Do note that I do not want to become a professional photographer, but I seek for capturing good photos while diving.

 

[PatW]

Padi Diver,

I have not used the camera strobe underwater. Camara strobes can easily over expose or underexpose. If you read the instructions, you can modify the strobe output pretty easily to compensate.

Or you could do it another way. The camera will let you modify the exposure by I think as much as 2 F stops with exposure compensation. Each way should work if you do not like how the camera is exposing your shots.

As I said, the in camera strobe will really make backscatter problems worse.

However, if you are in bright sunlight and in shallow water (30' or less) you can take good photos with ambient light. If you use RAW, you can adjust the white balance in post processing.

RAW has 4 major advantages to a JPEG format. RAW has far more information in the shadow and highlight area of your exposure than a JPEG. That means that you can reclaim lost details in shadow or highlights (well to a degree). You can also adjust the exposure. And you can adjust the white balance to your heart's content. So if you photo is anywhere near the proper exposure, you can correct it in RAW. Since underwater is a "challenging" environment, using every advantage you can is a good thing.

Good luck

Pat

 

[slowhands]

This is a camera that can be both very simple to use, or very complex (because it has so many options, useful once you know what they can do and why). It sounds like you are fairly new to this, and used to the Sony cams which are totally automatic. You don't even know what you don't know. So, as a bridge to learning how to use this camera, I'd suggest starting with the simple automatic modes and trying the complex stuff later when you have some experience.

In bright light near the surface, it's simple. You can set the camera in P mode, flash in Auto, ISO to 200, and leave most of the settings in their "automatic" or default settings. The camera will set exposure and all the other settings and take fairly good photos. Do use the flash diffuser, or the image will be really weird.

As you go deeper, or if the subject is very close, you are going to want to change settings to get a good photo.

Going deeper, the image gets more blue. You can correct this by setting White Balance to compensate. The camera has several useful choices, Shade, Underwater, and Custom. To set white balance, press the Func SET button to bring up the options on the left of the screen. The top setting is WB. Press the Right button to select each WB setting. Its effect will be shown on the screen as you select it, nice feature. When you have the one you want, press FUNC SET to select it. The Shade setting (Cloud Icon) will do some white balance, say to 5 meters of depth. The Underwater White Balance (FISH icon) is much stronger and will put too much red in the image for my taste, but it might work to 10 meters? The best is to use Custom WB. Read the manual to see how to do it.

When you want to focus on something closer than 20 inches, you have to switch to Macro focus mode and use the Wide lens setting. The camera has two focus ranges, Normal: 1.6 ft./50cm-infinity, and Macro: 0.4 in.-1.6 ft./1-50cm. To set Macro, press the left button and select the Flower image. Press FUNC SET to lock it. Now you can focus closer. Remember to undo this if you want to go back to longer focus.

The internal flash is weak, useful only for macro, and it causes backscatter (sparkles in the water). You need an external flash someday, to avoid backscatter and have more light. A good basic flash is the Intova ISS2000, about $150 with tray and cord. Very useful.

After you have taken a few hundred photos, you are going to want to do better. It's time to really learn the camera. Read the manual. It's rough going, there is so much to learn, but it's the only way.

Eventually, you will probably want to shoot L+RAW, to get around the White Balance problems. That requires that you have software that can process the RAW images, such as Photoshop CS5. Another learning curve for that, too. But well worth the effort.

As I said, this camera can be very simple to use or very complex. I tried to explain the very simple mode, and point the way to how to learn more. It's up to you how much effort you want to put into it. The more you do the better your results will be.

 

[Puffer Fish]

I would suggest only shooting in Raw, and using the free software that came with the camera, it does a fairly good job, and you can adjust almost any aspect. The learning curve is also very short.

This allows you to just shoot and adjust later, and you don't have to get it perfect.

You can also just use a light that has a nice soft, wide field of view. The big blue 170 lumin or the less expensive intova nova (wide angle version).

Here are some images taken without flash:

 

[WOODMAN]

I would advise a good supplementary manual for this camera, to assist you in understanding the factory manual. The Magic Lantern series of guides is excellent, and I have one for my G10 which has been very helpful. It does not directly address underwater photography, but then there are plenty of good books for that. One word of warning- you are on a slippery slope now, and you will eventually want the rest of the toys to improve your outfit. The strobe will soon prove essential, and most of us use two. You will find out all this for yourself, however. I wish you luck, but start with a good camera manual. Woody

 

[PatW]

I would second Woodman's comments. I got the Magic Lantern book for the G11. Since I shoot a DSLR on land, the Magic Lantern book was a big help. It is much better written than the manual. With a manual and the lantern guide, you can pretty much figure out everything on the camera. In some areas, the manual is a bit cryptic. The Magic Lantern guide usually covers the areas the manual falls down on.