"Magic!"

Today I finally found the time and inclination to use my "Magic" gel filter. This is a coloured gel that fits on the front of the lens (I use a screw in UV filter to hold it in place.) The particular hue of orange-red was designed by Alex Mustard to restore the colours lost to absorption of light in the water column.

Water absorbs reds first, and blue-violet last, resulting in a washed out appearance with increasing depth. Typically underwater photographers use strobes to create balance, white light at depth, but while this works well for some subjects, large objects become impossible to light in this way. The best you can do with strobes is to carefully select what part of the scene to light.

Sea Viking wreck, foreground illuminated by strobe.

The magic filter uses a different technique to restore colour. Instead of adding balanced light to restore colour, it filters out the blue light, reducing it to the same level as the red light that has already been filtered by the water, resulting in an overall balance. Its not an exact match, and some of the balance has to be done by the camera's white balance function, but the results can be dramatic.

Sea Viking, this time shot using ambient light and Magic filter.

Needless to say, no solution is perfect. Some subjects benefit greatly from the controlled lighting strobes provide, a strobe is just as bright at 100ft as it is at 30ft, and doesn't suffer from cloudy days. When exposure relies on ambient light making its way through a significant depth of water, and then a filter, I start struggling with shutter speeds falling and motion blur, still, for some subjects, it can be a startling difference.

Shark Cage with Strobe.



Shark Cage using filter.

These Horse-eye Jacks are almost impossible to photograph using a strobe thanks to their reflective bodies. Here the filter let me get close and show them as a diver would see them.

Update from Nassau

Well, it's been a couple months, and I've finally found some time to update the blog. So much has happened since my last entry I'd need to write a novel to get it all in, but here, at least, are some of the highlights.

Since my arrival I've been training up on the various procedures we live by in the photo lab, as well as learning to shoot video. I arrived in a pretty chaotic moment for Fin Photo, our manager, a 7-year veteran, was let go, our two most experienced staff left not long after, and our sales systems were changing every other day. It made for quite the learning curve!



Colleague Lorna is on the clock (I wasn't)

By mid January I was a more-or-less fully functioning member of the team, and was getting comfortable conducting the shark dives. Amazing the things that become routine! I now find myself pulling on chainmail at least every other day to shoot the shark video, or shark stills, or both! The shark dives are, of course, the best parts of my day, week, month, etc. No two are alike, and being inside a churning ball of reef sharks is an experience that doesn't get old. Today we had unusually aggressive behaviour from the sharks, which is a good way to get the blood flowing. Indeed, for Rupert (the feeder) a few pointed teeth managed to go into his chainmail far enough today that blood truly was flowing. In spite of this risk, it's hard to hide the joy I feel when I'm being shoved, bumped and otherwise beaten up by a bunch of sharks. Does that make me nuts? Open question I guess.



A crowd of my favourite toothy companions.

I've moved into a new house as of February 1st, the staff house I'd been put up in till now was getting pretty damn old, not to mention crowded (there were 5 of us at one point, in a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house). I'm living with Janine and Lee, both coworkers at Fin Photo, and both of whom only recently arrived on island, though Janine had worked here previously.

After a long, painful, and expensive journey, my camera system finally arrived a week ago, and since then I've put it to the test on a couple occasions. First was a 2-tank dive, and then later that week, the shark dive. As you might imagine, carrying a camera for yourself rather than for work completely changes your outlook, and these were some deeply satisfying dives, even if it took a little while to re-learn how my camera works, going back to Canon and Ikelite from Nikon and Sea&Sea felt pretty funny at first, but I was still pretty happy with the results. Turns out making 4 photo dives a day for 2 months will sharpen up those skills!



Myself, Lorna, and a very carefree turtle.

Anyhow, that's about all I have energy for at the moment, I'll be sure to post further updates as I go, there are enough dead blogs in the world already, I'll try not to go adding another one to the heap.

New Job

I don't have much of an internet connection, but I do have much to report!

I recently (wednesday morning) was offered a position working in the Fin Photo division of Stuart Cove's Dive Bahamas, on the island of New Providence (basically Nassau). Saturday and Sunday were travel days, and I'm just now winding down my first full day on the island. Tons of stuff to absorb, with the highlight being that I was sent along on the 2-tank afternoon Shark Dive, one of the staples of the operation.

We started with the industry-standard deeper "tour" dive along the wall, averaging around 60ft in depth, seeing the sights. This would be pretty normal, except that by the time the boat had moored, we already had 5 or 6 grey visitors circling...

Once we were in the water the sharks basically ignored us, keeping enough distance to suit them as the dive group swam along. All in all a nice wall dive, which included sighting a number of Lionfish. Foreign invaders, all the Lionfish in the Caribbean Sea are the descendants of a handful that were liberated from a Florida aquarium by a hurricane. Without any predators or parasites in these waters, they have multiplied and are depleting stocks of native fish that don't know them to be voracious predators.

Once back on the boat, we changed tanks and were briefed on the second dive, which would be the actual feeding dive. Our divemaster suited up in chainmail, as did the photographer I was shadowing. I jumped in and began guiding the guests down to the "arena," a bowl maybe 25ft across, scoured out of the sandy bottom in part by the movement of the sharks. Each diver was assigned a rock at the periphery, and our photographer began taking video of the arrival of the divemaster with the bait box.

The sharks were obviously used to the routine, and even before the bait box hit the water, we had been surrounded by over 40 caribbean reef sharks. Gone was the cautious distance they had been keeping from us. Once divers entered the water the second time, any regard the sharks had had for personal space was gone. We found ourselves in ringside seats for a feeding frenzy, centering on the divemaster/feeder, who used a stainless steel rod to spear dead fish from the box, and carefully take them out to be fed to the sharks. I managed to get away with only one light nudge from a particularly large female's tail, but our DM got quite a bit of abuse from the hungry sharks. Our photographer at one point had his entire hand taken into a hungry mouth, a good reason to be wearing chainmail sleeves and gloves (which he was!). The bait box exhausted, though still fishy enough to be the center of attention, our DM used it to lead the sharks away from the arena, allowing us spectators to briefly search for any teeth discarded in the melee, and return to the boat.

All in all, a fantastic couple of dives, and a not bad way to mark my birthday!

Stay posted for more updates as things develop further.

Terms of Use

I'm going to share a few little gems I discovered a while ago perusing the Facebook terms of use.

You see, I try to discourage people wantonly grabbing photos from my site. I accept that to some extent, I will never be able to avoid this kind of carefree transfer of information. Fortunately I don't think I have to worry too much about any kind of genuine theft of images (yet!). So far the only infractions I've noticed are people posting stuff of mine to Facebook. I don't hold any grudges, it seems like the most natural thing for any socialite to do these days, and there's really no harm involved.

Right?

Curious, I headed over to Facebook and clicked the little "terms" link at the bottom of the page. I didn't have to wade in very far when I found this gem in the legalese:



"For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it."--Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities

For those of you not too up on your copyright law, this says that Facebook can do anything it wants with your content, globally, for free, and that includes reselling it to others. The upshot? Facebook at least allows you to retain rights to the content for your own use (their rights are non-exclusive, so you can still sell copies of your own without getting sued.)

While you can delete this content, it won't make any difference if someone else has also copied it and has it in existence somewhere else on Facebook.

Real world harm? Probably not. First off, Facebook does not seem able or inclined to host anything of very high quality, so good luck trying to get a nice print from photos hosted there, this quality is also doubtful to be of much interest to a potential buyer. Secondly, if we're worried about images someone else posted without permission, that is copyright infringement, and if I find the time and inclination, I can submit a DMCA takedown form in true music industry style.

All the same, I'd rather not see my images, which have required a considerable amount of time and money to produce, casually forked over in this way. It's the principle of the thing.

So the next time you NEED to broadcast a nice shot to the world, use a link instead. (My site has a handy little "Share" button just for this)

HDR Images

One of the only kinds of "Photoshop" manipulation I enjoy using is the creation of HDR, or high dynamic range, images. It's a powerful tool, photographers used to rely on split neutral density filters, sort of like sunglasses for the camera, split, so the top half of the picture would be darkened (the bright sky) and the bottom half would be exposed as normal. The reasons for this become obvious on a day like today:



In this example you can see that there was a LOT of contrast, the sky is very bright, so the camera had to pick an exposure that wouldn't be too bright. At the same time, the foreground is dark, and the camera wants to brighten it up. Unfortunately, it's forced to pick something in between, so we get a sky that's a bit too bright, and a foreground that's too dark.

The way we get around this is to take 3 pictures instead of one:



We shoot the first way too bright, in this case 2 f/stops higher than the camera would have picked. The foreground is bright, but the sky is hopelessly washed out. The middle picture is the same as earlier, not quite right, but the midtones are good. The last picture is 2 f/stops darker than metered, but the sky looks just about right.

The real wizardry starts now. In order to get the best from each photo, we turn to software to generate a 32-bit HDR image. I'm not going to get into it here, but this is not the same 32-bit colour your display drivers will tell you you're looking at. Trying to cram this much information into a picture stresses my poor old laptop a great deal, and the poor attempt that a 32-bit monitor makes comes out looking like this:



Obviously we're not done yet. The last step is to use whatever software we've chosen (Photomatix, in my case) and find a way to use this wealth of colour information. This is more about taste in pictures than anything else, no need to be an imaging specialist, I like my final result about like so:

First Post

Tightening bolts on a giant spar arm, 45ft below the waves

After countless hours of labouring away in the coding internals of my website, it seems like I am at last getting close to finished. A heartfelt thank you must go out to all the posters on Smugmug's DGrin customization forum. Every time I had a problem making things just right, a quick search brought me the instructions and code I needed to get the job done - just fantastic.

With that done, or at least, having enough polish for me to start taking on other projects, the question is where to?

For those reading who don't know me, a quick intro. I've spent the last year building a diving resume, adding enough certifications and experience to get me employment somewhere tropical. Besides the odd course, or fun photographic opportunities like the one heading up this page, diving in Kelowna gets a bit quiet over the winter. This is hardly surprising, in January and February the Lake's temperature can drop to a brisk 2.2c (36ºf), and those of us without drysuits (blew all my drysuit money on camera gear) find 2.2c a little too cool for comfort

My hope is to find a job on a liveaboard dive boat, or failing that, anyplace where I can dive without needing a 14mm wetsuit, and continue building a photography business. In the meantime, however, there are still a few things coming up in town to keep me busy. I'll keep you posted as I go.