Tzetsin

hey! These links look pretty good. I'll be honest, I'm looking at the price of all those books and loosing a bit of hope. they're pretty pricy. I understand why, but if money wasn't tight I wouldn't be trying to identify them. lol

I've primarily dove around Cebu island, so I should only need one local species book eh?

Thanks for the great advice guys. it seems by the suggestions that there isn't a one stop shop kind of place for all types. I think maybe the book with all the species in an area might be the best bet. even if I can't get specific names, if I see a similar creature at least i'll have something to start with on an internet search.

Hi folks, as the title says? I've been shooting for years now and have amassed quite a collection of images. I've never really done anything with the photos before (ie. they sit collecting dust in my hard drives, haven't seen most of them since I shot them) but now I'm trying to organize and tag them all. So far, the best I can do is "fish" "Anemone" "crab" "nudi" "other"... honestly, I've no idea what about 90% of the creatures I've shot are. I've had a lot of fun shooting them, but life after the shot has never afforded me the luxury of going through most of the shots I've taken (of any kind) in the last 6 years. Life has taken a turn for me though, and I haven't had work in a long while. Money is getting tight and its time to put my passions to work. I've got enough imagery and skill as an artist to jump head first into full time photography and image sales (mostly because I don't have any other options atm, but that's beside the point ) So I've been spending time working on my "workflow" which I've never bothered with before. Part of that is tagging, so I can actually find images I'm looking for. Asking people about specific creatures using examples isn't going to work for this project, there are just too many of them, so if anyone knows of a functional method of finding the names of creatures myself I would very much like to hear your advice Thank you for looking! -Jason

Great images! They sure are an interesting looking animal, arent they?

you can pretty much get any smartphone unlocked these days. My wife and I travel all over the world with our normal canadian phones. We just pick up a sim card wherever we end up, stick it in and giver. As far as calling long distance, we dont. With the proliferation of VoIP, we simply use Skype, or Viber to talk to anyone we want back home. (just have to make sure they have one of those services before we go) Because of text messaging, we rarely make local calls in any place we're at either, though when we do, its pretty cheap typically. Canada has some of the most expensive cell phone rates in the world, so pretty well anywhere we go, we're paying less than home, so its all good.

I know this thread is a little old already, but I thought that I had something to add for future readers, if nothing else... I'm fairly new to underwater photography, though I have many years experience above the waves with a camera in my hand. I have to say that of all the images I've captured over the years the ones that require THE MOST post processing are the under water images. Underwater photography is extremely challenging. There are many things that make taking a photograph very hard and underwater photography has them all. The biggest problem with most shooters underwater is that they aren't photographers. Even as a photographer, I have a difficult time getting it right down there, so i can only imagine how hard it must be for the occasional shooter. Not only are most people only occasional shooters, but they shoot with equipment that is not at all ideal to shoot in low light. Adding flash is definitely helpful for any photographer, and especially those with inexpensive cameras, but flash presents its own difficulties. What I'm getting at is that I would have to say if you were a VERY VERY experienced "Photographer", and you had a LOT of experience shooting underwater, you could hope to get it right in camera every time. But the thing is that if you WERE that person, you would understand that trying to get it right in camera is actually pretty stupid anyway, because no matter how good it looks SOOC (straight out of camera) it will always look BETTER once you edit it. I should explain something that isn't apparent to most people that aren't photographers. You might think that the more experienced you get with photography, the happier you will be with your images. This is not true. The more experience you get, the higher your standards become. Once you've become good enough to fit into your higher standards... your standards will have raised again. This never ends. So the answer is YES, you SHOULD edit any image you intend to show off. Now I say any you intend to show off because out of 100 pictures, you'll likely only "like" a few. Those are the ones you edit, and those are the ones you show off. The other dozens of images do not get edited and sit on a hard drive collecting pixel dust. If you believe that your image is good enough SOOC, thats fine. There are a great many people that don't edit their photos. That doesn't mean they don't look ok, but still doesn't change the fact that with proper shooting techniques (shooting RAW vs JPG for example) and proper editing they wouldn't have looked better. BTW, if you CAN shoot RAW, shoot RAW. Period. No exceptions... ESPECIALLY underwater.

What a fantastic experience, and great series of images. It sure looks friendly, I have to wonder if it had eyes for your flash arms or something lol

Happy new years from Canada!

Thank you Lee Having a background in photography already really helped in combating the challenges of shooting underwater. Also helps with composition. Proper shooting kids / pets / animals on land is the same as shooting anything underwater, so shooting at eye level was pretty natural for me, and tbh, i didn't even think about it. I can see how new underwater photographers that don't typically shoot on land wouldn't know to shoot at eye level though. The LIionfish was an aesthetic choice for a shot, as you assumed, but I'll be honest again, I simply wasnt able to get a shot I was happy with of these elusive creatures. I saw many many lionfish, but they always hide, and NEVER seem to swim level... they're always sideways / upside down, backwards... This was the best I could do lol. I do have some other shots that arent "too" bad, but nothing really great. I'm glad to see that I'm not doing anything glaringly stupid underwater. When you don't really know much about the subject its easy to miss the subtleties of the subject, which is why i'm here asking about it. I'm glad you like the cornetfish shot (yea! I can stop calling it "that really long fish" lol thank you for identifying that one for me) It wasn't particularly easy to get as it was a night dive and my AF isn't everything it could be, in low light. I was actually really impressed with how well it did perform though and was happy that it was able to hang on to that eye. The fish was turning when i got the shot, so it really had to work to maintain focus and I've got a whole round of similar shots while it turned and almost all of them have the eye sharp. It does help that it has a big high contrast eye too. My UW photography is finished for another year though, so I'll have to see what shots i do have then see what I could have done differently and next year, Hopefully I'll be able to get even more interesting shots Thank you again for your words.

Sounds like malipasquas where its at on Cebu. I've never dove there, but I've been all around the island otherwise. The best place I dove was a Small boutique resort between cebu and oslob I'll check out your dive reports Bart. I tend to dive a lot right at Mactan because my wife is from Cebu. I don't go to the Phils to "dive" but to see family, so when I'm there I just dive close by, which is all over mactan and the surrounding sanctuaries. I suppose I wont know what I'm missing until I see these other places, so the next time were there, I'll make time to get to malipasqua and see I can tell from the images in those areas that the vis is a lot better than what Ive seen at Mactan for sure, which will make wide angle more feezable. Thats something I just couldnt make use of while on my last trip. which is to be expected with so much boat traffic there.

Hello everyone, I was finally able to get my camera underwater last month, and I would like to know how you thought I did. First a little background on me: I'm a hobby photographer thats been shooting travel / landscape images for the last 3 years or so, and I've gotten the technical aspect of photography down pretty good. Good landscape photography is pretty difficult in that you have a scene with lighting you cannot control and that is extremely high in dynamic range. To combat this you have to be a dab hand in post, so I've got a good amount of experience with that. I don't know much about fish, or anything underwater yet, though I love being underwater, and being able to see the wildlife so abundantly, and being able to shoot underwater was absolutely a blast (I wish i could "fly" on land!) The fact that I don't know anything about fish / underwater creatures or their behaviors has been a bit of a crutch I think. Knowing behaviors would lead to more interesting images I think, but I've got what I've got so far, and only time will allow me the knowledge of behaviors anyway. I'm very interested in the subject however, and I was hoping I could lean on you members here to feed this interest. I was hoping also that you guys could look at some of the images i have complete here, and some more on my smugmug site and give me an overall idea of how you think I'm doing. I'll post a link to the page with all the images I have so far, and I'll post a few here for those that don't want to go outside the forum. Thank you in advance for any insight you can give Link to the rest (I didn't put this in the critique section because it requires a single image for critique, I'm hoping for an over all opinion, so it doesn't fit there.) ISO 800 Focal Length 100mm Aperture f/5.6 ISO 6400 Focal Length 100mm Aperture f/8 Exposure Time 0.004s (1/250) . ISO 800 Focal Length 100mm Aperture f/5.6 Exposure Time 0.004s (1/250) ISO 6400 Focal Length 100mm Aperture f/8 Exposure Time 0.004s (1/250) I've included the EXIF for these images just for review purposes. I know they probably aren't the settings you would use.

Good to see fellow Canadians Sounds like you've been doing this for quite some time. I Agree with you that Edmonton is sorely lacking in just about all areas of extra curricular activities. About the only thing you can do there is skate lol Good hiking / rafting / climbing / diving is hours and hours away. My wife is Filipina, so we spend a lot of time there. In fact we spent a month in SE Asia last month (October, until Nov 15 i think) And I was able to experience my first earthquake and typhoon . I also was able to take my housing out for the first time and get a lot of images. I was able to dive about 28 times in the 2 weeks I was there, and 25 of those were with my camera. I'm not so sure I was overly successfull in my image taking, but I did learn a lot, so while I go through the images I was able to get I'll hopefully come to a better understanding of what I did that worked and what I did that didn't work. I do a lot of photography here on land, mostly travel and landscape, so exposure wasn't an issue underwater, but I don't do a lot of flash photography, and that was definitely holding me back underwater. How did your trip to the red sea go? Hi Stewart, I was planning on Malapascua this year, but I'd done so much traveling already by the time the time came to go, that I decided I'd rather stay in Mactan and dive. Maybe next time I'm there I'll finally get there lol. How do you find Anilao vs Mactan (im sure you've dove off mactan before since its so accessible)

That makes sense.

Its seems strange to me how weird insurance companies are against diving, but insure you all day long to drive. You've a much higher chance of getting hurt in a car than you do underwater. heck, you've a higher chance of getting hurt crossing the street.