adamhanlon

With the best will in the world, accidents do happen and, even though they are resistant to it, glass dome ports can be scratched in the field. @Alex_Mustard and @adamhanlon discuss some simple preventative procedures to help prevent this, and then provide some concrete guidance as to what to do should it occur.

Reacting to a recent post and multiple online and physical campaigns about an apparent overturn of the current shark fishing ban in the Maldives, Wetpixel Editor @adamhanlon tries to unravel the story behind this controversy. It now seems that the comments that provoked the campaign were taken somewhat out of context and the Maldives Majlis remains committed to the shark fishing ban and is in fact strengthening its enforcement of it. <

A frequent question on the Wetpixel forums and during trips and workshops is how to select good subjects for underwater imagery. Wetpixel Editor @adamhanlon sets out to try and give some ideas about how to do so, and discusses how your own photographic goals will rightly affect what you decide to capture and how much time you will invest in a given subject.

Although I use a wing style BCD (a Halcyon Explorer) and at the risk of being slightly controversial, I am not sure the classic horizontal diving position is the best one for taking pictures with! There is some evidence that a slightly head up position is actually a more natural angle when viewing through a viewfinder, and this is probably easier to achieve with a more conventional style BCD. I have been horrible to my Halcyon Explorer and it (somehow)m keeps going. I love the ability to create a weighted backplate with locally sourced weights and its light weight and durability. For warm water, I have been using an Atomic T3 (which is very, very similar to @TimG's Scubapro MK25 Ti). Again, I have been horrid to it and it just keeps going...

Is absolutely incorrect The better lights have better LED modules and this is largely what makes them more expensive. I can see the difference in light quality between them, so this is not a just marketing hype and I am not blind! All imaging involves the capture of light. Investing in the best quality of light available (or that you can afford) will always pay dividends in the quality of the imagery you produce. While the best quality may not always be the most expensive, custom built, short- run LED modules do not come cheap...

@adamhanlon chats to Harald Hordosch and Esther Boehm of Seacam about Nikonos lenses and how they convert them to work with modern Nikon SLR cameras. They discuss the advantages of water contact optics, how Nikon's design has stood the test of time, and the process needed to update them to work with modern cameras.

You can shoot video wide open with an SLR...you have to be aware of the optical issues, but at video resolution, it is less of a problem. You also have the option of bumping up ISO significantly, which you do not on a small sensor like that of an action cam. Big photosites are always better in low light Light is needed to restore color of course, and the ability to manually white balance (on any camera system) improves color performance. I think action cameras work best with filters for just this reason. My experience is that GoPros certainly need a lot more light than a comparable system with a bigger sensor. Natively, they also tend to be quite wide, which adds to the lighting problem. Getting powerful, wide lighting is typically expensive.

It works for RAW, TIFF and JPG. To get it to work, you need to open them from Bridge. I understand that a future release of Lightroom will also allow the opening of files into Super Resolution too. In terms of use, my testing of it thus far is that it is far, far better than Nik Blow Up and Gigapixel AI, particularly with low res images. Depending on the original file's quality, I have found it difficult to distinguish between the original and the up-res'd version and in "blind" testing have been unable to do sometimes. By comparison, artIfacting and inferior pixel level interpolation of both the Nik and Topaz products is immediately visible. Predictable, it works better on some files. I think it seems to cope well with some optical/technical flaws, but exaggerates others. Any overexposure seems to be nasty, but shadows seem to retain detail. Testing is continuing

I'm not selling my D850 and buying a D300 either! Actually the smaller photosites on cropped sensors are probably not where the real advantage lies. As Alex points out, the larger photosites on older full frame (say 5D Mark II/Nikon D3) are probably where this technology could have big impact. As we mentioned though, newer high resolution cameras are harder to shoot, more particular about optics and more prone to emphasizing any technique errors...

Actually, I would argue that action cameras actually need much more light than SLRs! An SLR correctly manually white balanced (which you have the option of) will produce markedly better results than an action cam. The general rule is that the bigger the sensor, the better it will cope with low light levels... I think many people (myself included) were attracted to the idea of a housing mounted GoPro that runs continuously while shooting stills. The goal being to get both still and video footage. What I rapidly discovered is that I did not have time to edit (or even review) the hours of resulting footage and whenever anything good was going on, my camera strobes ruined the video! Adam

I guess you although you could define the beam restrictors as "snoots," but they are really used for controlling the angle of light from the strobe, rather than providing a single tightly focused narrow beam of it. In terms of use, I tend to use beam restrictors for controlling how the light falls off for wide-angle photography whereas the LSD (or what I would define as a "snoot") is very much a macro tool. Adam

Globally, it seems that for most underwater image-makers, for a period at least, diving may be restricted to diving locally. For many of us, this may entail diving in cooler water conditions than those we would normally dive in. @Alex_Mustard and @adamhanlon discuss some ideas about customizing your equipment to allow more productivity and to concentrate on creating innovative imagery.

@Alex_Mustard and @adamhanlon chat through a wide range of strobe accessories. Our goal as underwater photographers is to capture light, so anything we can do to improve or modify our flashes' output can provide great benefits and significantly improve our images.

A possible game-changer? Adobe recently released their new Super Resolution function in Photoshop. Based on machine learning this allows for significant and very accurate upscaling of images. @Alex_Mustard and @adamhanlon discuss how this may affect underwater photographers' choices of camera and allow for a whole new criteria when assessing camera performance.

For CFWA and WAM, the WWL allows you to get your strobes pulled in tight to the lens and hence illuminate right in front of it. The collars push the lights out and make it harder to do so...