Red Sea Pictures

I've managed to scale back my images from the trip to a more manageable number, and done the preliminary editing on them. I've put a gallery up here

Please bear in mind that there are still too many, and the quality on some of them is not as high as I would wish, but I felt I should get something out rather than nothing! The gallery will be changing and shrinking(!) with time. Any comments/feedback or likes and dislikes would be very welcome.

Sturgeon

Capernwray has 4 of these pre historic looking fish!



I think sometimes sci-fi is based on reality!

Moody black and white macro shots

I was lucky enough to be diving at Capernwray last Sunday. Congratualtions to Darryl Leaning on completing five PADI Instructor Specialities. It was a very busy day, that ensured limited visibility, together with rain and cloud making underwater conditions very gloomy.

I used the conditions to experiment with black background macro shots-by keeping my aperture small, and using only the light from my strobe to illuminate the subject. I then converted these into mono, using Lightroom.

I quite like the result-the perch loook like boxers to me! Kind of bruised but still with attitude!

Seth playing in the sea (and Jacob looking cute!)

I've added some pictures from earlier this summer to my pets and animals page on my web site We went down the the slipway at high tide on a sunny day and messed about! Seth enjoyed fetching his ball out of the waves an Jacob just chilled out being cute!

More 60mm f2.8 pictures

Some more shots from yesterday. The bokeh on this lens really impresses me

Gnarly old trout!

Congratulations to Scott Evans for completing his PADI Digital Underwater Photography and EANx specialities yesterday. DUP is of course an excellent excuse for me to get my camera in the water at the same time! I was trying out my "new" Nikkor 60mm f2.8. I got it at the same time as my 105mm VR and it has played second fiddle to the longer lens for a while. I have found that it is a REALLY sharp lens, that focuses fast and is a great length for fish portaits.

While diving with it yesterday here at Capernwray, I found this battered old brown trout. Trout, when they reach a certain age, develop a pronounced hook jaw (when they are called a kype), and in the last stages of their lives, darken in colour.

I've added more pictures from the day to my www site here

Slave strobes at Capernwray

A black and white shot from the shoot with Alex that I mentioned earlier!

More black and white seal shots from the Farne Islands

Black and White seal

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!

Sepia tone in Lightroom

I took some trout pictures in Capernwray yesterday and whilst downloading them, started playing with the greyscale conversion in Lightroom and using the split toning function. One comment I have had about my Capernwray is that the pictures are too blue, so Ithought adding some greenish tint back into the black and white may work.

I'm not sure what do you think?

My video on BBC

I am quite ridiculously proud of the fact that BBC news and News 24 used some stock segments of underwater video that I had shot at Capernwray last Wednesday. They used them to illustrate a section on the impact of the banking crisis on small business! Thye sprung the request on me on Tuesday, and I had to let them have some footage that I keep here for illustrating some points on our PADI Open Water course. Given that the clips were not my best work, I was pleased that they got used, and they did actually look really good on the broadcast.

Rightly or wrongly, seeing my footage on a national broadcast has really made me very chuffed!

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!

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.

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.

Fish portait

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 yesterday

Antony Gatrell completed his Instructor Speciality courses with me at Capernwray yesterday. We were joined by Dave Morgan, and between us hence had three cameras on the go. It was a pretty bright day, so ideal for wide angle, so I chose to use a 105mm VR macro lens! Still quite like the results-I wasn't sure about the leaf picture, but I do quite like it!

Getting lost with Roger

David Kneale, Michael Ashworth and I put our faith in Roger Heron's usually keen sense of direction when we set out to do a Multilevel Adventure Dive last Saturday here at Capernwray. The plan was simplicity itself, so David and I tooled up with cameras and promised to be "bad buddies" while Roger and Michael led the way.

Well we turned left instead of right, and had a memorable dive along the weed festooned walls in "dappled" sunlight. It was very pretty, and we managed to save things at the last momment by re-tracing our steps. It was a great dive (even if not the planned one!)

Sunny walk around Heysham HDR images

Last Monday, I went out for a walk around the Barrows at Heysham. It was a beautiful sunny day, but there was a strong wind blowing. The contrast in the woods was very stark, so I made my first attempts at HDR images. These are the result of 5 pictures, at +2 and -2 exposures, blended via Photomatix pro. The colours are amazingly vivid, although the wind has caused some leaf movement, and hence some ghosting.

Diving at Capernwray last Thursday

Dave Morgan and I went for pleasure dive late last Thursday, cameras in hand. I was using my 10-17 with a 1.4 teleconvertor to try and get those up close and personal pictuers of the Sturgeon, but it was not to be! No sturgeon to be found! Still, the trout were on form, and the sun put in a brief appearance! Thank Dave for a nice dive!

Diving and trout feeding at Capernwray Today

Another glorious day! Caron and I went for a few dives. Visibility was excellent, and the trout were on form!