Need help improving photos

[PatW]

Ok, Lightroom has 8 color channels: red, orange, yellow, green, Aqua, blue, magenta and purple. You can separately modify each color in 3 different ways: hue, saturation, and intensity. For hue, you can make the blue channel longer wavelength or shorter wavelength that jus yellower or more purple. Saturation can be reduced to just a shade of grey or way over intense. Lightness, not what they call it, is like making the color darker or lighter.

It it comes in handy. If you have a yellow fish that looks a little to green, you can adjust the color. If you want to emphasize a color marking on a fish, you can boost the saturation. You can also fool with the blue channel to get the water in the background to look the way you want.

the problem is that lightroom can be used on jpegs but it is designed for RAW.

About fish, approach slowly. It is easy to scare a fish and get fish butt shots. It is best to shoot fish in profile or as they approach.

For or many fish, what works is to watch them. You can figure out how close they will let you get. Sometime if you just stop and wait, they will approach. A trick I often use is to watch a fish while I am still outside of its range of caution. I will figure out where the fish appears to be going and get there first, go motionless, and wait for the fish to come to me.

A DSLR has no shutter lag worth mentioning. It has tremendous precision of focus. I can focus on a fishes eyeball. Of course, it is also large and heavy, out of the water. Another thing is a point and shoot is pretty flexible all in one. It seems with a DSLR, if I have a 105 macro lens, a turtle will come up and make faces at me and I can get great eyeball shots.

 

[divebrasil]

Wow, it took a while to get the first answers, but then this thread got traction and a lot of good advice. I will definitely keep the tips in mind.

Yes, I ended up doing 1 trip a year that includes diving. This liveaboard was the first time the whole trip was dedicated to diving. The 2 guys on the boat with a serious photo rig were solo divers. They know to get the best photo they should also jump in before the group.

In regards to RAW, with my current camera it's just not possible because it takes way too long. There is no faster memory card option.

In some cases I am too close for a good shot, let's say when I want to include a coral head in the shot, in others too far like the shark pictures. I guess what people do is they decide what they are going to shoot before the dive, either take a macro lens, a wide angle or a long lens.

Thank you very much for all the answers.

 

[drice]

I agree with divealpha, give a micro 4/3 format a look. It's going to have many of the pros as a DSLR (such as no shutter lag) at a significantly lower cost. It's also a smaller format so lenses/housings etc will weigh less (a plus when it comes to travel)


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[Scuba_Jenny]

I feel your pain on the slowness of the RAW writing on the SP-350, I could get 88 images on one card. Of course a large number of those images were deleted for one reason or another. Really hard to tell a critter to hold that pose for 10 seconds, lemme try again! . It's time to upgrade. I went with the Canon S95, still an older camera, shoots RAW and can take a big card. Good luck!