Sunday 29 May 2011

Triggerfish remote strobe sensor

Continuing on with remote strobe testing.

Triggerfish is a wonderful little slave trigger made by Hedwig Dieraert. Here's a review on Wetpixel

To test how sensitive it is underwater I toddled off to St Leonards for a dip.

Vis was maybe 6m and Triggerfish worked perfectly 10m away where I couldn't even see the strobe anymore.

Just need to design some method of positioning the sensor like a spike, clamp or mini tripod.

Tuesday 24 May 2011

Gregarious Giant cuttles

Winter in southern Aus is giant cuttle mating season. These normally secretive relatives of squid and octopus become all outgoing and inquisitive.

They will often follow divers around and even occasionally come in for a hand shake, like in this video.

I was shooting stills at the time then quickly switched to video when the cuttle showed interest. With a bit more time i would have done a manual white balance and used -1.0 ev in Aperture priority for better colour and exposure.

Tuesday 10 May 2011

Bounce flash underwater

I don't hesitate to use bounced flash when photographing above water but it had never considered it underwater.

On a recent dive on the ex HMAS Canberra frigate, in less than perfect vis, I tried a few shots with the strobe pointing up at the ceiling of the wheelhouse. The results were a great improvement over direct flash which produced bad backscatter.

Top image is direct flash, single strobe.
Lower image is the bounced flash version.