Here are a couple pics of the St. Albans, Grace Shannon and Stuart shipwrecks off of Milwaukee. I did not take pics of the Prins Willem or the Car Ferry this trip, but will work on that next time. Pictures are a bit dark as I was just shooting natural light.
Thanks Dan, John, Jeff, Bob, Jason, Doug, and Luke for joining me, it was a great weekend of diving!
Ron
Wow! Great pics. Water looks so clear. Are those zebra mussels on the wreck in the last pic?
Did you try to crank up the ISO a bit? The 7D can take some decent shots even at 1600. A higher ISO setting may have allowed you to increase the shutter speed just a tad. I like the compositions. thanks for sharing
Ron buddy, that last pic looks like the sun must of been REAL brite on the surface for that to be just natural light
Nice pics.
(On a side note, I wish divers that bought expensive cameras would learn about auto exposure bracketing and hdr processing. These days its getting so popular even my fone's 8mp camera can shoot in it and process automatically, there is just no other way to cram as much detail in a picture any other way.)
That last pic has some crazy shadows for natural lighting. ;D
Joe, take your advice and fix your avatar. ;D
Ron that was a awesome weekend for diving! the pictures are great an having the natural light down to 200 feet was a bonus! I cant wait to do it again! The Alma is a great dive boat With some super surface interval lunches!
Jeff
I think many of us know about hdr. But trying to use this technique underwater presents additional challenges. The biggest challenge is that underwater the environment is constantly in motion -- water is moving, the photographer is floating, fish and subjects are swimming. You need to shoot at speeds around 1/250 to stop motion underwater. Now add in the fact that with hdr you need to bracket multiple exposures. Even though my 7D can fire off shots at 8fps that still adds ~1/8s of time between each shot. I think to make this kind of shot work properly the underwater photographer would need to choose a composition with very little movement (i.e. shipwreck) and the photographer would need to use an underwater tripod.
Also, most decent underwater shots require strobes. There is no way you are going to get standard strobes to fire fast enough for those kind of bracketed shots. The stobe recycle time is just too slow. So you would need to find a composition with adequate natural light or maybe try to use some sort of video lighting source.
The vast majority of underwater hdr shots I've seen actually start with a single photo exposure which is then converted into 3+ layers using photoshop. The result can be interesting and pleasing but it isn't exactly the real deal.
I'm definitely not dismissing the idea of using hdr underwater. But just pointing out that it's not the same as taking an hdr picture of a scenic landscape using an iphone.
Yes totally true on hdr being more difficult in the underwater environment, I've tried photoshop a few times for hdr processng, but photomantix? Is much better designed ... its all about post procesing for the most part with hdr, depending on the frame, hdr is fairly forgiving if you crop to match images. Plus I don't think id use a camera mounted strobe for underwater hdr... you can just shift exposures and not use auto bracketing if you would really want a strobe to refresh, same end result.
Most underwater hdr I've seen is like bluewater stuff, not many wrecks.
As for my avatar I just took a video grab, I've never used the hd hero camera function, ill play around with faux hdr processing.
Pretty Damm good shots on a Technical dive!