Monthly Archives: January 2016

Color Correcting

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I’ve been spending a large chunk of my off time this past week color correcting my Bonaire pictures. I shot just over 1000 pictures over the six days of diving so it’s a lot of work, and I’ve really been struggling with some of them.

When I was shooting with the red filter, I was really excited about it, because what I was seeing in the viewfinder indicated that it was correcting the colors well, and it was giving me a very realistic feel because I was using natural light, at least at depth. In practice, some of these pictures have been very hard to color correct, because they don’t have a single overall cast – parts tend to be very yellow green, other parts kind of blueish. Other pictures are not so hard to correct, and do, in fact, give a good sense of what it’s like to actually be there.

I’m also having trouble with a lot of my strobe pictures, and today, I think I figured out why. I spent a lot of time this trip relatively shallow, around 30 – 40 feet, shallow enough that at the sync shutter speed of 1/60th second, and minimum aperture of f/8, I’m still getting a significant amount of exposure from the red deficient ambient light. This is leading to pictures that need to have a lot of red correction thrown at them, not to mention some with visible motion blur.

In addition, I was having trouble aiming the strobe sometimes, so I’m seeing a lot of pictures where one side is lit by strobe, and the other side lit by ambient light.

So what would I do differently next time? For one thing, go deeper. From a composition standpoint, working along the reef wall works better than the reef shelf anyway, and it reduces the amount of ambient light. The darker ambient light also makes it easier to see the strobe’s modeling light. The aperture can’t be set any smaller than f/8 *, but the camera does have a neutral density filter I could try.

For very shallow work – say, under 20 feet, I found the camera’s underwater white balance setting in program mode works decently.

Right now, I’ve gotten about two and a half days worth of pictures processed. I just replaced the sea horse picture from the first day of boat diving with a better adjusted version. Once I finish getting the pictures looking the way I want them, I’ll start figuring out what I was shooting, and get them online.

* The Canon G12 is a fairly advanced point ‘n’ shoot camera, but the lens focal length at the short end is only 6mm. Apertures smaller than f/8 would be small enough to introduce significant diffraction.  ↩

Last Dives

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I did the last couple of dives of the trip today. I fly out tomorrow at 3; this means I had to be out of the water by 3 today.

I ended up doing two dives today. When we got up, it was raining and the sea looked kind of rough, but by the time we were done with breakfast, the waves had calmed somewhat. We had decided to do Aquarius again, mainly because of the easy entry.  Nice and sandy, we could just walk in and out. Or we could just walk out if we came up in the right place, but we ended up a little off course. Continue reading →

Seru Largu

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Last evening, at sunset, I took a drive up to Seru Largu, a mountain overlook in the center of the island. There’s a big monument up there, and from there, you can look out over the whole island.

The view was breathtaking, and it was so quiet and peaceful up there. To the south southwest, I could see a rain shower pouring over Kralendjik and Klein Bonaire, while to the west, I could see the sun setting. Continue reading →

Thursday Diving

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It was really too early for a boat dive at 8:10 this morning, especially after last night. Everyone was kind of draggy, and in fact, Ralph skipped it. Paul was hoping to do Rappel this morning, but when we got there, there was clearly too much surge there for the boat to be safe, so we headed southward to the next mooring spot, “Bloodlet”. It gained its name when Captain Don, who surveyed and named most of the sites, cut himself up getting out of the water after his boat sank. Continue reading →

Full Day

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A very full day today.

The first dive of the day was a shore dive in the morning to a site called “Weber’s Joy”, or “Witch’s Hut” (a lot of the sites have two names). It’s a beach full of dead coral sloping down to a sandy bottom, which slopes down to the reef, right by the main road to the north. We had a little trepidation about getting in, especially for one of the divers who was recovering from a broken leg, but we decided to go in. Continue reading →

Four Dives

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I’m sitting here on the patio of our unit, looking at the sun set over the sea. It’s been a long day, and I’m a good kind of tired.

The day started at 5:10 this morning, when the alarm went off for our dawn dive. Paul had proposed it last night, and Joe, Chris, Brie and I had taken him up on it. Paul himself was at the dock, but skipped the dive, having had a tiring night the night before with his spaghetti supper. Continue reading →

Afternoon and Dusk Dives

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After the boat dives this morning, Paul took care of the free flowing in my regulator, and then Ralph, Joe, and I headed out for a leisurely dive on the house reef. It was a really nice dive. I was such a relief not to have the regulator constantly leaking air, and I felt a little more comfortable heading deeper along the drop-off on the reef. This time, we headed to the north, along the edge of the reef, until we reached the sunken boat at the next resort. It was easier taking pictures along the wall than it was on the flatter reefs we’d been doing. Continue reading →

First Boat Dives

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This morning, we did our first boat dives. We left the dock shortly after 8 with all twenty of us and our guides Remy and Connor. The first dive was at a site called “Rockpile”; I don’t remember the name of the second site.

Rockpile is on the other side of Kleine Bonaire, a small deserted island off the western coast of the main island. The site sloped down from about 20 feet into the depths; I mostly stayed shallow. I’ve had a regulator free-flow that’s been costing me bottom time so I didn’t want to go too deep.

Continue reading →

First Day of Diving

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Today was our first actual day of diving. After breakfast, we headed down to the dive shop to pick up our weights, and get in the water. The resort requires guests to do their first dive on the house reef, in order to allow people a chance to get their weighting (and hence their buoyancy) correct before heading out other dive sites.

Continue reading →