Your footage of the Jawfish with the +15 MacroMate is amazing! Makes me want one. Couple questions since you ditched the red filter:
1) Do you ever shoot WITHOUT the light and Macromate? If so, do you miss the red filter? What White Balance do you use?
2) Did you find settings that let you get great wide angle shots as well as Macro shots on the same dive? (considering how little you can change settings underwater?). For example, I read you should change the zoom to 1.4x for Macro, but it seems that might not be ideal for wide angle.
Answers:
1) Yes at shallow & bright sunlight. That Blue Spotted Jawfish was shot without video light.
At depth & lack of sunlight & night dive I use my 3000-lumen SeaLife SeaDragon 3000, as shown in my Cleaner Shrimps video, below.
Since MacroMate lens subject is usually within 2-4” away from the lens, I have to dial down the light intensity to the lowest intensity (1000 lumens?).
I’m not worried about backscatter since the water column in front of the lens is not much. If the subject is about a foot or farther away then I would not use the MacroMate lens and use the video light. If there are lots of particles in the water columns in front of the GoPro, then I remove my video light from the GoPro mount and shine the subject from the left side so the particle reflections won’t bounce onto the GoPro and creating the backscatter.
I like the SeaLife SeaDragob 3000 video light because, not only it’s bright enough for what I need with wide angle beam, but also it can be removed from the camera mounting in a single button press. I can hold and shoot the GoPro with my right hand and remove the video light from the GoPro mounting and shine the subject from the left with my left hand.
I use
Shotcut for my video editing (including White Balance, zooming, slowing down the motion, etc.). since 2018. It’s good enough for me and it’s FREE. You can find plenty of Shotcut tutorials in YouTube, for example this one, below:
To do White Balance in Shotcut, you just tap the section in the video clip that you want to edit (a red frame will be shown on the section to indicate that section is ready for editing) and tap on Filter, tap on White Balance and choose the temperature level. The default one is set at 6500. If you want to cool it (put more blue tone), just slide the temperature bar to the right or type a higher number like 7500. Likewise if you want to make it hotter (put more red tone), you slide the temperature bar to the left or type a lower number like 5500.
In addition to White Balance, there are other video filtering options such as Brightness, Contrast, Color Grading that I use a lot to improve the color and remove the hazy look that GoPro often put out when visibility is limited. With those 3 parameters, I can make the green water becomes less green, blue water becomes more blue, 80’ visibility becomes 100’ visibility.
2) I set it to Wide for all of my shots regardless whether it’s for wide angle or macro.
