Here’s A Question For You
Let’s assume you want to create an image that has a strobe-lit, colorful foreground subject and properly exposed water in the background. If you are diving in rather dark, greenish water as you might be in New England, California, Oregon and Washington etc., would you want your strobe to emit a brighter light (more powerful strobe or higher power setting on your strobe) because the water at depth is not...
In almost every underwater photography class I teach, when the subject is lighting and strobes students are quick to ask a question regarding how many strobes they should use. My answer usually comes in the form of a question, or several questions. That’s the way I teach. I want students to think about the potential answers and my reasons for answering the way I do instead of trying to memorize my answer and simply accepting...
Hi Vivid-Pixers!
“Have underwater camera. Will photograph fish”.
I think this mantra applies to just about every underwater photographer in the world. After all, colorful fishes are one of the underwater world’s feature attractions, and for photographers many species are simply irresistible. But despite all of the things that fishes have going for them- color, beauty, eye-catching antics and fascinating behaviors etc.- it is still possible to take rather boring photographs of even some of...
Read the article "One-Click Editing with Vivid-Pix - We test the editing capabilities of Vivid-Pix with .jpg images from La Paz" written by By Brent Durand that appeared on the Underwater Photography Guide website
Hi Vivid-Pixers!
If you watch new underwater photographers as I have over the years, you would surely see that a significant percentage of them that try to take pictures of dozens of subjects on almost every dive. I often explain their style as “shooting at anything with gills”.
I get it. For a lot of us...
One of the pitfalls for underwater photographers, especially newer shooters, is failing to have their subject fill a pleasing percentage of their photographic frame. All too often, the result is a fantastic subject that is too small in an image. In short, the best way to describe a picture like that is “an opportunity lost”.
This is so cool...
Pardon me for the dated use of “cool.” I don’t have a better way to express what I feel.
I live in upstate New York, USA. No, not skyscrapers and concrete...this is primarily farm country. Think apples and dairy cows. And I actually enjoy living on what many people would consider the frozen tundra. As my...
Though certainly not the norm, occasionally some photos can come out grainy.
When an image is very dark, or very low contrast, the potential for graininess rises. In particular, when your camera is forced to boost the low light level that it captures, the image may become grainy. You may not realize this is happening because cameras generally make this boost automatically. And some cameras do this...
So just what is lightness and contrast?
In an image, lightness (or brightness) is the overall light level. The picture of an eel in a coral crevasse at 30 feet is a good example of an image without much lightness, unless you illuminate it with a strobe. A dolphin just under the surface can be an example of an image with high lightness.
While there are many techniques for sharpening, some yield better results than others. We have selected one with a counterintuitive name...Unsharp Masking. Why? Because it tends to accentuate the important parts to the image without increasing visual noise or graininess.
