New (to me) G10

[JohnN]

I have a new-to-me G10 and have some 'best practice' questions to help me progress my underwater photography skills.

I've been marginally successful with a Canon A95 and an old SL960 (not "d") flash, and would like to increase my successful photos.

My interest is small stuff and my buoyancy control is almost good enough to allow me to do this reliably :cool2:

Everything I read suggest Manual mode is the way to go, with that in mind here goes:

1) I'm planning on shooting RAW + JPEG (I'm hoping I can throw away obviously bad pictures before trying to fix them). Is this the right approach?

1) I read that ISO 100 is recommended. The G10 supports ISO settings of 80. Is that preferable?

2) Is center-weighted or spot metering generally preferred?

3) I also read that a good starting shutter speed is 1/125. The G10 has that magical * button to set the F-stop based on the shutter speed. Should I be taking advantage of that?

4) #3 sounds much like plain-old shutter priority. If I'm shooting macro stuff, wouldn't plain-old Aperture Priority (to control the depth of field) be a better choice?

5) My upgraded strobe is a SeaLife 960D. How do I go about setting the variable flash? And since I'm flooding (hopefully) what I want to shoot with light, doesn't this muck up the exposure metering (see #2).

6) At what point would teaming my older SL960 with the SL960D, two flash heads, be worth the 'extra' trouble. (I'd have to fabricate a new tray but that isn't a terrible burden)


Thanks!!

 

[Warmwater Wank]

John--You'll enjoy the G-10 a lot. It gets noisy at higher ISO's (at least above 200) and also a bit in underexposed areas but using 80 or 100 ISO avoids that for the most part. (No real gain or loss between those 2 choices btw.) The noise is not significant and the camera does a great job. Maybe shoot RAW + jpeg for a trip or two but if you start to do much post-production you may begin to question the need for the jpegs.

Shooting in manual and planning to light the scene entirely by strobe means you aren't metering, so center-weighted etc. is not a critical choice. You hit on the key notion when you wondered about lighting the scene w/ the output from one or two strobes, wouldn't that"muck up" the metering. Yep, it would since the camera metering wasn't warned about the "flood" of strobe light about to happen!

If your interest is small stuff you are going to be in close enough that your strobe(s) will always be providing all or most of the light for exposure. What you end up doing is controlling the exposure then with aperture and/or strobe output adjustments. (And yes, 1/125th can work for a shutter speed, at least until you want to experiment a bit. Higher speeds can make for blacker backgrounds, lower can make for bluer background water).

Choose a high f/number (which also gives more depth of field, good idea for most macro) then all you typically are doing is adjusting the strobe output. If you have the strobe maxed out, lower the f/stop number a bit. After a dive or two the strobe settings are pretty easy to figure, it isn't a micro-adjustment situation.

I have no experience with the strobes you mentioned so I'll skip responding to those questions. If they both can be slaved though it won't be any big deal to use them with fiber optic connections, at which point cobbling up another tray for them would be well worth it.

Enjoy the camera, I always thought mine was a real solid performer. // ww