Sponges at Bateman's Bay

The water at Bateman's Bay was freezing cold last week, being only 13 degrees above freezing.  This is one degree above my coldest dive ever.

I'm trying a different camera rig at the moment, replacing a camera flash with a video light.  I'm trying this because I'm tired of processing photos at home to find that the flash has overexposed the photo, even though I've got the flash power at minimum.  It seems that the flash on the Canon G15 is just too powerful for close-up or macro shots.

This time I attached a fabulous little QUDOS underwater video light.  It is designed to attach to Go Pro cameras, but it was pretty simple to configure a rig that would attach to my Canon underwater housing.  It is designed to go down to 40m underwater.  It puts out 400 lumens that is more than adequate for the type of close-up photography that I need a light for.

 

The light has 3 modes from spot to wide-angle, with high and low power on each.

I left the camera in Program mode, but unfortunately the Canon gives preference to Aperture, which means that most of the time it was using f1.8 with a shutter speed of 1/30sec to 1/60sec which is too slow for somebody floating around in the underwater surge.  As a result, most of the photos were slightly blurred.   Next time I'll set a shutter speed of about 1/125 or above.  Regrettably the Canon underwater housing doesn't give you access to the dial that changes the shutter speed, so I'll have to set this before mounting the camera in the housing.

Here are the best pictures of the day: a sample of soft sponges.

Hawaii trip approaches

Only 5 sleeps to go before our trip to Hawaii.

I’ve just got a new camera for the occasion, a Canon 450D with a set of 18-55 and 55-250 image-stabilised lenses. This camera is quite different from by previous 38-380 Kodak digital camera as there’s a lot more to worry about in the settings department.

And now I have to decide which lens to keep on as default – the short or the long range one. Murphy’s Law says that whenever I have the short-range one on, I’ll need the telephoto one on. Mark reckons that when travelling in Thailand recently, he just kept the short-range one on.

I went to the botanic gardens this weekend to try out some high-contrast photography. A few months ago I went to a rainforest (with my previous camera) and I was disappointed at the quality of the photos that I took – in the rainforest it is dark green with the occasional splash of intense sunlight – sometimes reflecting brightly off leaves. The Kodak camera didn’t handle low light-level situations well. Most of my photos ended up being either too dark, or overexposed where there were patches of sunlight. So yesterday I took myself off to the rainforest area of the botanic gardens to try again.

I guess that it was a learning experience, without much to show for it. While the camera handled the environment better, I still wasn’t able to capture that dark rainforest look with a million shades of green all around. For Father’s Day today Matt gave me a polarising filter that I think might help with the reflected light off the leaves. Surprisingly, the best ones were taken when I used the flash. And the ones where I got the camera settings right were the ones with the worst compositions. Anyway, as I said, a learning experience. After we get back from Hawaii, I’ll try again with my new polarising filter.

I hope to be able to take a lot of shots in Hawaii. I’m taking a large USB drive to copy them on to. Karyn’s taking her netbook for me to use to upload and store the photos. I don’t know what the hotel charges for internet access – certainly up in Sydney it was too expensive for casual browsing. It’s probably costed for business people who can just add it to their accommodation bill.

Today was Father’s Day, so Karyn and I went to the Bella Vista restaurant on the lake at Belconnen where Matt works. He was working there today because of Father’s Day. As usual the food was terrific. Karyn had lasagne, and I had a prawn and calamari entree and a pasta dish with strips of veal, mushrooms, chilli, olives, and other yummy ingredients. We washed it down with a lovely bottle of sparkling shiraz. Karyn finished off her meal with a dessert made from champagne blended with lemon liqueur, cream, and lemon sorbet. With 3kg left to lose on my diet, I gave dessert a miss.