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Yesterday I went for an inaugural dive with my OM System housing for the TG-6 (it’s my son’s camera, was only used without a housing till now), in Sydney’s Clifton Gardens. For lighting, I started off with one Backscatter Mini Flash 2 and OS-1 snoot.
Here’s a series of 9 shots, and captions below:
- 1/ My first image of this green moray eel, standard 45 degrees snooting position as described in this snooting masterclass.
- 2/ Then I went for more of story-telling shot, as it retracts into its den. The here is to feature more of its environment.
- 3/ For a portrait, I thought i’d get more impact by facing the moray, so I repositioned myself, but as this cheeky guy liked turning its head sideways, I realised i’d always get an asymmetrical lighting, with half of it in shadow, and I didn’t like the look of it.
- 4/ So I backed off, and spent a while adding a second strobe and adjusting my lighting so that both light beams would meet in the middle, coming from the sides. Then I took this shot, and realised there was a discarded fishing line that would mess with all my shots. So I proceeding with cutting off that line, the moray didn’t seem to minds.
- 5/ Then I returned and after a couple of adjustments to my strobes positions, I got this shot which is my favourite of the series. Note there were a little bit of algae from the pillars in the sides of the frame, but disappeared with liberal use of the post-crop vignetting tool (Lightroom).
- 6/ I would have stopped with #5, but then I remembered the TUC May photo challenge, so I turned off my right strobe to see what sort of moody look it would create on the eel.
- 7/ Then I switched around, using just the right strobe. I prefer that version, with algae projecting graphical shadows on the eel.
- 8/ Then I added a backlight (Backscatter MW4300) but realised I needed to increase my ISO to 500 if I was going to see a bit of that light. Unfortunately the image quality (sharpness & colours) starts to drop with the TG’s small sensor. I think it’s very good at ISO 100 – 200 though.
- 9/ The moray then started taking a keen interest in the backlight, my air had dropped to 30 bars, so it was time to leave (I would have added some colour filters otherwise).
Hope to see more participations in this very cool theme!
