Thursday, 6 August 2009

Discovery Channel-more sensational rubbish

Discovery have launched another week of bad biology and sensationalist crap about sharks. Thay continue to vilify these apex predators in order to satisfy (or stoke) a perceived public need for gore on TV. Wolfang Leander makes an eloquent case-Discovery Channel

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Friday, 24 July 2009

Disneys Oceans

Check out the preview for Disneys Oceans, scheduled for release on Earth Day 2010
http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=L93MT8VfDfk

The breeching whale sequence is awesome. If you would rather watch it in HD, check out here:

http://xrl.us/be48fv

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

Diving with the good doctor

Last Friday, I was fortunate enough to go diving with Alex Mustard here at Capernwray. He was passing by on his way to a Scubapro event at Largs in Scotland. We did three dives-one of about and hour and ten minutes, a short one of 40 or so minutes and a final one of one hour twenty! It was a great experience to simply watch where he points his lens! I realise now that I have fallen into the classic trap of becoming too focused on the subject, and ignoring (to the pictures detriment) the light and scenery around it. Particularly with wide angle shots, and pretty clear shallow water, the light, sky and surroundings are as important for a good picture as is the subject being in focus!


20090710-Capernwray with Alex Mustard-013920090710-Capernwray with Alex Mustard-0241

This is a bit of a revelation! I guess I knew it all along, but had forgotten it! To be honest, I have been becoming a bit jaded with my underwater photography over the past couple of weeks, as many of my images seem to have become quite similar and predictable. Alex has just nudged me into how can shoot better and different images.


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Lastly, we attempted to set up a particular image, in this case with no success due to some technical issues. What is becoming obvious is that great images are in part at least created rather than just captured.

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Saturday, 11 July 2009

Fish portait

Diving at Capernwray -4

Diving with free divers (and trying to photograph them!)

Sorry for my poor record in keeping this blog up-we are very busy at Capernwray with courses runing just about every day-and my laptop refuses to work underwater!

On Friday 26th, David Hack and I went off for a photo dive. It was some time since David took his camera underwater, so the idea was to work out a few kinks and get some time in underwater. We were joined for the latter portion of the dive by Rosie Hancock, who I had been doing the AIDA course with. I have long wanted to get some good images of free divers underwater-they look so good! Anyway, I found that getting the shots was more dificult than I thought. The best angles seem to be straight up-which causes all sorts of problems with exposure! I was trying to use the strobes to light Rosie, and expose for the background, but with a 1.4 x teleconvertor on, was finding that I had to back off to far for the strobes to light her up, or if I turned the strobes power up too much, lots of backscatter. Ok so learning point is to shoot with the 10-17mm Tokina, without the convertor off!
Diving at Capernwray -5 Diving at Capernwray -2Diving at Capernwray -3
 
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