Round two from my new camera...

[huskychemist]

My name is Lowell, and I'm an Underwater Photography Addict.


So...does it count as addiction when you leave your wife at home with the son the day before Mother's Day at 2:30 PM for an afternoon of diving with your buddy, and you don't get home until 1:30 AM...then stay up another hour and a half looking at pictures...posting them to your web page...trying to ID critters? Well, if that counts, I'm addicted! I feel as though I've been hoodwinked. The questions I asked about which camera to buy should have been prefaced by warnings about wanting more/better gear, and becoming addicted.

Wait. You did tell me that!


Well, I posted my first round of pics here last week and got some great feedback from many of you about how to make my pictures better. Thanks for that. So here are some links for round two. Your advice is helping...

All from Puget Sound...

Our first dive was at Redondo. Saw the biggest ratfish we've ever seen. My pictures of it didn't turn out...Leopard nudibranch on the pipe boat. It was raised up like it was eating. Very cool. Heck, we spent 20 minutes at the pipe boat going around slowly taking pictures. Here's that gallery. (Very parsed down...I took lots of pictures...these were the best.)

http://scuba.huskychemist.org/Galleries/Redondo-LT-5-13-06/Index.htm

Then we filled our tanks and headed to Alki Pipeline. We spent so much time photographing we didn't even make it to the end of the pipeline. The orange sea cucumbers were out in full bloom! And I had to avert my eyes a few times...the crabs were feeling a bit randy.

http://scuba.huskychemist.org/Galleries/AlkiPipeline-LT-5-13-06/Index.htm

Then on to Three Tree for a night dive. Thanks to the fireworks from just up shore, we managed to find our way to the water. Our plan was to find a tire reef and circumnavigate taking pictures. We never made it to any tire reefs. We spent too much time looking around at cool stuff. Found a few octos, and got inked by one of them. Found a poacher. My initial ID is a sturgeon poacher. Lots of worms, but very few of my worm pictures turned out. And some crabs on eggs. That was very cool. I've got one of the crab with egg pictures here...although it's a bit blurry.

http://scuba.huskychemist.org/Galleries/ThreeTree-LT-5-13-06/Index.htm


I don't know folks' opinion about having to visit a page rather than seeing them here... Sorry if that's not what you prefer. Let me know... I can modify my way of doing things.

Thanks again for your feedback. It really has been helpful.

Lowell

 

[midwestdvr]

all i get is an error message

 

[Kirgan]

all i get is an error message

Me too.

 

[huskychemist]

The links are fixed in the original post. Sorry about that...

I won't let it happen again. Thanks for letting me know there was a problem.


Lowell

 

[midwestdvr]

nice. i could tell you're getting the hang of the camera with each dive. what was the viz?

 

[havnmonkey]

Looks like poor viz, but good pics... really like the two crabs!

 

[ocrmaster]

What camera are you using?

Did you go manual focus with white balance?

I like the lone crab with the high detail. The octopus also looks cool. You might want
to crop the picture to only include the octopus and remove the backscatter.

 

[huskychemist]

Thanks! Vis ranged from 12-15 feet on average for these three dives. I was using a Canon A620 with the Canon housing. Still using "auto" features, with the "Underwater" setting. Once I get better at knowing focal length, etc. I'll be trying some of the manual features. I agree, that with more time, some of my pictures can be cropped to keep them focused on the important stuff. Other than cropping, resizing, and watermarking, I've avoided any re-touching of my pictures. Some day...

The addiction continues.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Lowell

 

[CompuDude]

Nice! You're definitely starting to get the hang of things. Best advice I can give at this point (being only a little ahead of you) is to get close, then get closer, learn your macro mode, use a flash whereever possible, and practice practice practice so you learn how the camera "likes" to focus! At this point you're pretty much dependant on the camera to do the heavy lifting, so you should start seeing more and more good pictures once you get a handle on the type of the pix the camera likes to take, and then start taking more of those pix! As you get more comfortable, then it's time to start branching out and getting more creative.

All the while, adding money into the strobe fund.

 

[midwestdvr]

I leave the macro mode on at all times with my camera. It doesn't hurt when I shoot ordinary or wide angle. I notice that most of my out of focus shots are because I've switched to view the pics I just shot and forgot to turn it back on when I switched back to camera mode. Can't use macro mode on auto though.