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Before
I go any f urther, let me lay down my credentials. Experience
in land photography: a bit. Total experience in underwater
photography: about three weeks. Lifetime photographic achievement:
a picture of the cat playing in the garden and a pleasing
shot of an ornate ghost pipe fish. Err... That's about it,
really.
I
discovered underwater photography when Jane, my wife, purchased
a Motor Marine II. Soon afterwards, she moved on to a housed
SLR system and started to obtain some pretty amazing results.
So I eventually became the proud owner of a brand-new Nikon
D100 with a Sea & Sea housing. Forget the bank balance!
A f ew days later, we were off to Wakatobi. No half measures!
Although I'd owned SLR cameras before, I tried to play with
the D100 on dry land as much as I could, in order to get to
know the thing. As I was using a digital camera, I didn't
have to worry about wasting f ilm. Other than the digital-specif
ic features, the camera didn't really feel much different
from my old F601. The same photography modes were offered:
Program, Aperture, Speed and Manual. Select a mode, select
a speed / aperture combination, point lens towards subject
and shoot. Easy! What differed from my old SLR was that I
could then review the picture immediately, change my settings
and shoot again.
Time
to get the camera wet. I must have checked every 0 ring at
least half a dozen times. The housing looked OK in the rinsing
tank, so off we went. In Wakatobi, the choice of subjects
was rather impressive so I had to concentrate hard on choosing
my subject rather than take holiday snaps. I started with
stationary models and a 60mm lens.
The
f irst hurdle I faced was the exposure. After some conversations
with experienced digital photographers, I had decided to shoot
in Manual mode, rather than Aperture or Speed priority. I
used a YS90DX strobe, designed for digital cameras. This combination
of camera and strobe didn't allow me to use TTL metering.
Instead, with the YS90DX, I had to set the strobe's power
setting manually. My f irst pictures were appalling. At this
point, I discovered another very useful feature: the Delete
button! After the dive, why show people that you're a complete
moron when you can fake it by deleting the abysmal shots before
you've even reached the surface? Very quickly, I developed
a new technique. Take a picture, see what's wrong with it,
delete it, take another one and so on. After a while, I found
a good combination of f lash and exposure.
Once
I had a basic grasp of the technique, I set about improving
my composition. I once heard Peter Scoones say at a BSoUP
meeting: 'It's not the number of megapixels in your camera
that counts. It's what you have in the viewfinder and when
you press the shutter". How right could he be - Wakatobi
is known for its plethora of pygmy seahorses and I really
wanted to get decent shots of them. 'It ccn't be that difficult
I thought. "Attach the biggest lens available, add whatever
magnifying device you can find, get close. Et voila! See you
in Antibes." I attached the 105mm lens to the camera
body, screwed on a diopter, added e Nexus wet lens to the
housing port and set off in my quest of mega-close-ups of
the eye of a seahorse. With "a bit' of help from the
dive guide, I found a fan with 2 Hippocampus bargibanti.
Perfect so far. However, finding the seahorse on the fan was
one thing, but finding it though the viewfinder when the camera's
depth of field must be a couple of millimetres is quite another.
My frustration grew. Dive time: 70 minutes. Time spent on
the fan.. 40 minutes. Photos of the fan: a f ew. Photos of
pygmy seahorses: nada. First lesson learnt the hard way: don't
try to run before you con walk.
During
the next f ew dives, I used the 60mm lens and tried to choose
easier subjects. Whip corals, bubble corals and anemones all
offered some lovely static opportunities. Slow moving creatures
such as nudibranchs, lion fish, and leaf fish were everywhere
in Wakatobi. One bit of advice I was given was to avoid getting
too close to mantis shrimps. With their expert kung-fu kicks,
they can somewhat spoil your day and upset your insurance
broker if they don't like the look of your camera.
With
time, I found myself actually taking fewer pictures instead
of just pretending I'd only taken a few!
I did try my hand at wide-angle photography, using a 16mm
fisheye lens. The results were not fantastic, but I'm sure
it was more down to the operator than the camera. This said,
my pride wasn't that dented because the D1100 is not known
to be a particularly good performer for wide-angle photography.
This is due to the size of its CCD and the magnification issue.
To tackle this problem, Nikon recently launched 2 lenses specially
designed with digital cameras in mind: an AF DX Fisheye 10.5mm
f/2.8 and an AF-S DX 1224mm f /4 G IF-ED zoom lens. That's
what I should have used to get those award-winning shots!
I f ully blame the equipment! One of my biggest concerns when
taking up digital photography was the amount of storage required.
In full resolution, the size of TIFF images from the D100
is about 18MB. The Nikon Raw (NEF) images are just over 9MB.
I used exclusively Raw format when saving my pictures, as
this would later allow me greater control when retouching
the images. A IGb Microdrive card allowed me to save 109 pictures
which, in most cases, was enough for a day's diving. I then
needed to transfer the images from the card to a bigger storage
device. I knew that my luggage allowance would already be
very stretched so taking a laptop with me was out of the question.
My two best choices were a portable CD writer that could read
memory cards, or a portable hard drive. The first option was
the cheapest and safest as CD-ROMs are more difficult to crash
than hard disks, but I would have to pack a stack of blank
CDs in my luggage. The alternative I chose was a nifty little
toy called Phototainer. This portable jukebox has a 20Gb hard
drive with a built-in LCD screen and weighs next to nothing.
It can read Microdrive cards and connects to a PC or Mac using
a USB2 port. It can also doubleup as an MP3 player or backup
computer hard drive.
After
ten days on the remote Indonesian resort, I really felt that
my underwater photography skills were improving, but I also
knew it was only the beginning of a lengthy learning process.
Each day, I was able to review my pictures on a television
set. Experienced photographers would give me advice on how
to correct some basic mistakes I had made. Had I owned a 35mm
camera, I would have had to get my films developed every day
at the resort to check my results. With 1,200 pictures taken,
it would have been rather costly! Admittedly, digital SLR
cameras are not cheap, but once you get over the shock of
the initial expense, they don't cost you a penny, other than
the price of gadgets and gizmos you keep buying afterwards!
I
flew home with mixed feelings about my results. As my first
photography trip, I hadn't expected miracles. It took me a
few dives just to get a couple of shots of pygmy seahorses,
and I still have to learn the secret of having them pose for
me! Seeing other people's successes made me very envious and
I fully intended to persevere in order to obtain perfect images.
That's when I decided to cheat!
One
nice feature of digital photography is the ability to retouch
images. Some say it's cheating, but everybody does it! The
ethics debate has been going on for some time. My opinion
is that I take pictures for my own viewing pleasure. If I
can make an image more pleasant to look at, then why deny
myself the tools to do so? Backscatter seldom adds anything
to a picture, does it? Of course, it is possible to scan a
35mm slide and load it in Photoshop. Raw format files go a
little bit further, allowing you to enhance sharpness, the
aperture, the contrast and even the white balance of NEF images
to a degree far greater than TIFF images with image manipulation
software. As a beginner, I also liked the amount of information
that was stored with the image f iles (the EXIF data). A year
down the line, I can now open a photo and check which lens
I'd used, which camera settings I had and so on.
One
of the main criticisms I had heard about digital photography
was that the resolution offered by the cameras was not nearly
high enough compared to that of traditional 35mm film cameras.
Although CCD chips currently on the market are still f ar
from achieving slide film resolution, they are sharp enough
for most uses. I printed some of my photos on a Canon A3 photo
printer and the 3000 x 2000 pixel images certainly looked
sharp enough to me. I will simply try to sumup what I enjoyed
and what I missed with digital.
The
greatest advantage in my view was the camera's LCD screen.
Being able to check my images while still underwater enabled
me to take corrective action immediately and fly back to Britain
with better results. Raw f ormat f iles offered great versatility
for image editing once I got back home. The cost was the next
advantage. I took about 1,200 pictures in Wakatobi; the saving
on f ilm and processing was rather substantial.
I
may have found it easier to learn underwater photography using
TTL, instead of having to juggle with various strobe and camera
settings. TTL is a slight modification of Through The Lens
metering where the digital camera and the strobe communicate
via a series of pre-flashes, microseconds before the shot
is taken. Alex Mustard has described the technique in an excellent
article published in Underwater Photography Magazine. He also
mentions the use of coloured filters for available light photography.
Alex, I'll be picking your brains soon! Hooked? You bet!
Reproduced
from in
focus 78 (Spring 2004) |
