Shark Experience Bahamas with Olympus EPL3, 9-18mm and Zen Dome Port (link to pics)

[RadHal]

Just got back from Nassau Bahamas diving with Stuart Cove, 3 days, 12 dives including two Shark diving experiences, May 2013. I was happy with my pics obtained with the Oly EPL3 , Olympus EPO housing, Oly 9-18mm wide angle lens, Zen dome port and dual Sea and Sea strobes (YS-01 and YS-27). Shot in RAW, mostly in manual mode and post processed with Adobe Lightroom 4.1

Bahamas - Shark Adventure - a set on Flickr
or
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/112860461314188558285/albums/5877267288597139377

Lessons learned when shooting wide, need to extend out strobe arms wide to avoid backscatter with lots of kicked up particles from the sharks. Also check images at the end of the day to see where you went wrong and correct mistakes, using a larger screen than the back of the camera. I got too much backscatter, requiring extra post-processing.

Stuart Cove diving were a very professional, well oiled machine. They were friendly, safe and I would definitely recommend them.

Hal
:shark2:

 

[FlyinV]

These are some great pics!

 

[Gdog]

Nice work!

 

[tonyN]

Nice, spent a week in the Bahamas in late march with basically the same set up; EPL-2, 9-18mm and the Zen dome port. I need to learn the camera, but managed to get some nice pics.

 

[RadHal]

Hi Tony, cool pics, you were really fortunate to have the dolphin, Tiger and Hammerhead encounters. Which island were you on?

 

[tonyN]

Hi RadHal
I was on a live aboard with Dolphine Dream from out of West Palm Beach and we stayed in the northern parts of the Bahamas around the Little Bahama Bank. I can really recommend this trip, its well organized and the crew is very good.

And yes, I consider myself lucky for all the encounters we had. I was pretty sure we'd see tigers, and we had at the most three individual sharks at one dive. Then the fat one was there for most of the dives, she was also a really nice one and a real player. No problem to interact with here even when she came up real close.

The hammerheads were a bonus that I didn't have high hopes for, but we had two of them on two dives. But I think maybe the Leman sharks were my favorites, they're real fun to interact with...they were all over.

Hopefully I'll be back in two years time.

 

[ggibson]

Looks awesome! Thanks for sharing.