Scuba Diving Vacations

I took a quick dive yesterday with the new camera and underwater housing. First thoughts... a flash would be helpful... adn I need to shoot RAW. It was a very gray afternoon, and there was a pretty strong south swell, so the Place of Refuge was a bit more mucked up than usual... probably 60 foot of viz in the shallows and 80-90 at depth.

Wow! The camera reacted quickly, locks focus practically instantaneously compared to the cameras I've used in the past. I was using the underwater settings that are hidden on the camera... Olympus does a very poor job at explaining how to get at them in their manual, had to look it up on a message board, it's easy to get to and they have an underwater macro and underwater wide angle mode you can toggle back and forth between at will... more on that in another post. I spent most of the time just pointing at things using the underwater macro mode.

I took a bunch of photos, some of them turned out OK. The biggest issue was the dark day and lack of light made for typical underwater blueish photos. Without shooting in RAW, where you can adjust the white balance after the fact, and not taking time to custom white balance the photos underwater as I was taking them, I had to rely on my weak photoshop skills to get the proper colors on the fish. This photo of an Ornate Butterfly fish turned out pretty OK.

I'm off to the shop for the afternoon... open noon 'til 6 on weekends.

Steve