Best of Mike #16

One of the consequences of going back to the beginnings of my journey thru underwater photography is that you are going to see the learning curve.

You are going to get to see my evolution of as photographer and the evolution of my equipment.

I had never wanted to be that guy underwater with the "moose antlers". The photographer with the huge camera and the long, long arms on their strobes.

Those guys and their equipment, just seemed to be in everyone's way.

So I started out with the most compact system I could.... and only added stuff when I had to, to get the pixtures I wanted.

Today's pix is a pretty good example of why I came to own strobes.

The deeper you go, the less natural light their is. The smaller the critter, the more likely it is to be tucked away in some small crack or crevice.

So, it didn't take very long at all before I was wanting and needing to add some artificial light to the pix.

When we were in Belize, I was still using the 2nd camera that I ever owned, a Nikon Coolpix 990. It was a great little camera, nice and small and particularly good at letting me get close to things (I think the minimum focus distance was 0.9")

Today's subject is an Arrowcrab, who is doing his work behind a coral head, in among some sponges.

I had added a single strobe (underwater talk for a flash) so I could get some light onto the subject in shots like this.This pixtures shows the two problems that I was having with that new piece of equipment.

In the foreground of the shot there is a coral head that is pretty white and getting too much light from the strobe, so it is showing up as hot-spot.

The strobe I had then was a small one but still too powerful in closeup situations like this. The camera just didn't have a small enough aperture for me to get the exposure right.

Very often, I was wanting to direct light under an overhang or into an opening. Even way back then, it was the little stuff that I like best and that's where they hang out.

So, I had mounted my strobe directly over the lens. The downside to that, I learned, is that any particulate in the water reflected light back to the camera and showed up as a spot. There are a lot of spots in this pixture.

So why, you ask, do I keep a pixture with all these problems?

I like the composition and the warm colors.

And ..... sometimes (probably not in this case) advancements in photo editing technology let me, years later, fix problems in a pixture that I couldn't fix when I took the shot.