Reply To: Fluorescence underwater photography chat

[Bryan]

WOW!!! Thanks @bryana1 this is a gold mine of information on, like you said, a subject which is little tried and known by the underwater photography community. It’s really a niche within a niche, plus you’re focusing on macro/supermacro, which you could argue is also a niche within underwater photography!

A niche, within a niche, within a niche!

This post will be a great starting point for anyone wanting to dabble with fluoro photography (I’ve pinned it at the top of this forum).

Thanks!

Working with only 120lm is a heck of a challenge (your setup #1)! Especially knowing that the “yield” of the fluorescence process is quite poor: so little light comes back to your camera. For stills photography, I was going to suggest you try using strobes, until I saw your setup #4. The AOI wouldn’t be my first choice though, and I think you’d definitely make your life easier with brighter strobes, like the Hybrid Flash. Since you’re doing super-macro, you could benefit from a device that would focus the light down to a narrow angle. This might have to be DIY territory, the closest example that comes to mind is Retra’s reflectors.

I’m going to preorder some HF-1s today! The AOI’s really were just sitting on a shelf as my wife ditched them for MF-2s.🤣

Since you mentioned auto-focus issues, have you considered using a white-light focus light, that automatically shuts-off when detecting the flash of the strobe? There are quite a few with this feature.

I do have some focus lights with auto-off but never thought to use them for fluoro since I have no use for the white or red light when scouting but now that I think about it… it wouldn’t matter! I will give this a shot.

Now onto the artistry…
I love the 3rd shot taken with the setup #1. The patterns and colour combination are very nice. I only wish the centre polyp (assuming it’s one) would be a bit sharper. This is something that a bright strobe light can help with, whether it is about freezing subjects or increasing your depth-of-field. On that shot again, if it was my photo I’d tweak the pale blue (HSL sliders) to make it more vibrant, reinforcing the blue/yellow colour pair. Now I don’t know how much you like editing colours on your shot, this is very personal.

Yes I tried to sharpen that very same polyp 🙁
I’ve attached the original to show where the edit started.

The nudi is my pick in setup #2 series. Composition & complementing colours are both ticks for me.
Series 3/4: some great shots there too

Thanks! That nudi was a rarity. I don’t normally see nudi’s glow completely like that. Not the white ones at least. Usually the scattered, patterned, pigments on the skin are what fluoresce whereas this guy lit up like light bulb. It was a treat.