A Day at the Coast

This weekend I had another leave-pass to go down to the coast to do some diving.  I stayed overnight at Bateman's Bay afterwoods because leaving at 5am start to get down there by 7:30am and then having several dives makes me really tired sometimes and it's not worth the risk of driving home on the same day.

Instead of a normal dive, we went on exploration dives to areas that haven't been dived before.    The thing about diving is that you don't travel far under the water and you can't see things until you get right up close to them.  So until you get down to the bottom you don't know what you'll find.

Colourful sponges

A moray eel peeking out

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 A wobbegong shark having a rest on a rock ledge.  This is probably the largest one I've ever seen - maybe 2.5m long.

A boarfish

 Part of a shipwreck I found.  This piece of timber was sticking out of the sand an covered with crustaceans.  I cleared some of the sand away and took this photo.  My dive buddy had swum away and after I found him again I couldn't find the wreck.

I went for a drive down to Malua Bay.  The beach was pretty deserted except for one surfer and some folks with metal detectors looking for loose change, I presume.

Experiments with HDR

For a while I've been wanting to have a try at a High Dynamic Range photo.

This technique is used where if you set the exposure right for one part of the photo it's too dark or light in another part of the photo, and there is no adjustment that makes it acceptable.  I've seen it used where there is a large range between the brightest and darkest parts of a scene, such as strong sunlight and deep shadow.  If you adjust for the bright light, then then everything in shadow is just black, but if you adjust it so you can see what's in shadow, then the sunlit parts of the image are overexposed and maybe pure white.

HDR involves merging a series of images at different exposures and using the best parts from each.

Here I took 3 images at different exposure settings and then combined them into a fourth.  I put something white in the foreground to reflect the light back.

I tried another one with more of the image in shadow.

I was going to do some more, but the cloud came over and the bright sun disappeared.  Maybe I'll try it again when there's something more exciting to photograph.