Saturday 29 August 2009

Fantastic seal diving at the Farnes

As a part of Alex Mustard's Northern tour(!) we went to Northumberland to dive on the Farne Islands. This island chain is well known for it's playful seals and we went with the express intention of trying to photograph them. We joined Paul Walker's excellent rib and spent an amazing hour and a half playing, interacting and photographing these wonderful creatures. The first dive was characterised by seals biting and tugging on our fins, biting my dome port shade and strobes and generally showing how poor our buoyancy control and propulsion techniques are! Photographically, the conditions were perfect. Bright sunshine and shallow water, with relatively calm water made for some great scenic shots. I found getting the exposure correct challenging, the brightness of the surface was too great a contrast with the bottom. Camera angle relative to the sun, and framing are the key though!

The picture above is one of Alex's of me taking the mouth picture below! I'll feed more pictures from the dive onto this blog over the next few weeks. It was an amazing dive-world class!

Off camera flash and underwater photography

I've been involved in a project with Alex Mustard in using slave strobes to acheive an off camera type effect. We took some pictures at Capernwray last Wednesday, and I ws amazed at the results. We used a combination of a Heinrichs Weikamp slave strobe adaptor that triggered a Sea and Sea YS30 and in turn two big Subtronic strobes. In fact though I brought along a Firefly 1 slave set up, designed for use in dry caves, and put it into an Otter box. The results were excellent.I'll post some pictures here soon
 
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