4 replies to this topic

[james]

Hi Gang,

Sarah and I just returned from a trip with the Houston Underwater Photo Society to Little Cayman. We had 6 days diving there with reasonable weather (rained most of the time) but great viz underwater.

I decided that for this trip I was going to shoot lots of wideangle and that I was going to follow Craig Jones's recommendation to use complementary filters to improve the color in my images. It worked!!!

Here are a few wideangle photos (kinda big to show the detail):









My impression from working on the photos in CS3 is that the color is a lot richer than when I shoot without filters. It creates a lot more of a "provia" look is how I'd describe it. It also helps control the sunball a LOT better. I did one day's diving w/ the fisheye with no filter and had a lot of "sunball blowouts" - which were not a problem when I used the filter on the lens. With the green filters on the flashes I did have to increase their power to full - but that was OK as I was using Ike DS200's which have a lot of power.

Just for fun, here's a photo of Bloody Bay Wall taken w/ the fisheye - which shows just how dramatic of a drop-off it is. 10m down to 2000m!!



Let me know what you think. I also shot some Macro but I'll post that in a different thread.

If you're interested in seeing the EXIF and the rest of the photos check out my gallery. I've upgraded to Gallery2 and I really like the features:

http://www.reefpix.o...yman HUPS Trip/

Cheers
James

[yahsemtough]

I'm interested in hearing more about the filter use. More specifics that is. I do see the richness you mention as compared to without.

Cheers

Todd

[james]

Hi Todd,

I was lucky enough to be able to take some comparison photos because my wife and I were both using similar rigs. I had a 17mm lens w/ filter and she had the 17-40 w/ no filter. I'll be putting together an article (probably next week) showing some comparison shots and giving more details.

Cheers
James

[AndreSmith]

[quote name='james' date='May 31 2007, 07:59 AM' post='130593']
Hi Gang,

My impression from working on the photos in CS3 is that the color is a lot richer than when I shoot without filters. It creates a lot more of a "provia" look is how I'd describe it. http://www.reefpix.o...yman HUPS Trip/[/url]

Just wondering which parameters you were using. It seems to me that you could acheive something quite similar by selecting landscape mode in parameters which boosts the contrast a bit. Or were you shooting in landscape mode already?

[loftus]

Not to steal this thread, I have posted some thoughts/questions on the use of filters in the Image Processing forum.
http://wetpixel.com/...showtopic=19271
James or Andre, do you have any opinion on this?

Edited by loftus, 01 June 2007 - 02:03 PM.