rramaley

Very nice!!  I love how you can see the brittle star through the nudi!!

Here's an updated link to the video as it seems that the old link is no longer working...

This is great stuff! I am going to Hawaii with friends in May, and I think we've got a couple black water dives planned. I've got a similar setup to yours, therefore I am curious about your settings. -Did you MWB on a slate at the beginning of the dive? -What optics did you use? It doesn't look very wide... But I am not sure I have a good sense of scale in each shot! -Did you set the focus once and for all, or did you try to vary during the dive? -You are saying that the Sola were insufficient. Do you mean in terms of lumens? Or battery life? I would have thought that for relatively close subjects, the dive would have been similar to a regular reef night dive and thus the Sola would have been a tad bright... -And finally, how deep were you diving? Of course you don't have to answer all questions... There is much to learn just from your footage. Did I say it already? Great stuff!

It's a bit embarrassing but I can't remember what I did with my white balance - I think I had it on auto - recommend just taking a white slate or something, filming it at the start, and using that to adjust in post production. White balance wasn't as critical as the light / focus (had this on auto as well) / iris.   I used the flat port lens that comes with the Bluefin Pro housing - I knew the critters were going to mainly be small.....   I was told by the dive guide to give the critters a lot of light and to manually adjust the iris to control the amount of light the camera picked up. That being said, I know I still had hot spots on a number of the critters.  Needed more dives to get it right.  The 2 Sola 1200's were insufficient in terms of getting enough light to come at slightly different angles to light up the critters and prevent a narrow light band.  I had the lights placed basically up against the lens angled out to give ~ 4 inches of darkness in front of the lens (important because of backscatter and the little white worms that love the light).  So the critters were filmed about 6-7 inches in front of the lens and had another ~6 inches or so before they went outside the beams. Battery life was fine.  My lights were on medium most of the dive and they lasted the full 75 minutes (whew, I was worried at first).   As for depth, we were anywhere between 15 and 45 feet, most of it was at ~ 30-35 feet....

So we ended up going with Jack's Diving Locker.  Was a pretty amazing experience - we went on their scheduled night and it was just the 2 of us on the boat, and chartered the boat for a second night (again just us 2) - if you can wing it that you are the only ones on the boat, it is a very special experience.  The dive guides were in the water but for them it was a pleasure dive since they didn't have to worry about us.  Each dive was ~75 minutes and some fantastic things floated by.  Matt D'Avella (JDL's resident expert) takes a bit of warming up to (and likewise him to us) but we had a good time diving with him.  He'll also give you good tips if you listen....

Here's a video I pulled together of my footage - pretty happy with the results though I wish I had a week of consecutive diving to work the kinks out.  One big recommendation: bring a sh*% load of light - Matt the dive guide had 5 lights on his rig!!!  My 2 Sola 1200s were woefully inadequate.  

I'm very pleased - my video has received some coverage last week from the local Tasmania newspaper!

http://www.themercur...odays-news.html