Underwater photography

So you see, I was so enthusiastic about diving. 10 months ago, I bought a new camera with it's underwater casing even before I had plan on where to go/when to go/how to go/who I'm going with to diving. Crazy ain't I?

Although the camera didn't serve it's main purpose (taking diving photo) for the last 10 months, I had bring it along to have a swim in Dec when I was in Phuket. The underwater photo wasn't that bad because that was just snorkelling, floating very near to the surface of the water where sunlight can reach.

Fishes in Phuket (Click to enlarge)

It is a different story althogether when you're deeper into the ocean. You see, water absorb colours, from the longest wavelength (red) first working it's way down. It's all about science.

Water is a substance which is 800 times denser than air. As soon as light enters the water, it interacts with the water molecules and suspended particles to cause loss of light, colour changes, diffusion, loss of contrast and other effects. A photo taken under water at one metre distance is not unlike a telephoto above water at 800 metres distance, both looking bluish while lacking contrast.

-Extracted from www.seafriends.org.nz, read more about it here

Which makes all my photos look dull and bluish. It seems like there's a blue curtain covering the picture. Here's a few ugly pictures: (click to enlarge)

Look at what clown fish becomes..seems like it's been highlighted using Stabilo highlighter

Very plain bluish photo

My existing photo editing software couldn't make those pictures any better. After the weekend, Daniel showed me some of the edited pictures (2 pictures), he edited them using Adobe Photoshop. I was amazed by the result, the photo shows out their real colour as what we see when we're down there.

Before

After

See!!! It is so much different. I'm thinking of buying a colour filter for my next diving trip. Haih..another few hundred bucks gone lor...like throwing money into the salty water. Any sponsors out there? :P

Here's another photo after editing by Daniel:

I had been learning Photoshop ever since I saw the result, but after awhile I got bored, and I get back to play Maple for the whole past weekend. Haha..

Anyway, I will try my best to learn up the software and edit the existing photos. Maybe I should go to Daniel's house and had him teach me how to do it, it'd be much faster that way, compare to me surfing internet looking for article/tutorial on Photoshop.

Oyster

It is important to have a camera when going diving. This is because we were not able to talk in the water, and there are so many types of different fishes down there that I won't be able to remember when I'm back on land.

These are called christmas tree worms, there are blue, yellow, grey+white in colour
When you touch it, it'll shrink to nothing and grows back to original size in a few mins, very cute looking
I didn't know they are worms, I thought they were plants

It is so much fun when we can talk about the different types of fishes and corals and funny funny things in the water. With a camera, we can do that.

These are called Banana Fish, they swim in schools, must be very clever

At night after the dive, we were flipping books trying to look for a match with the photos I took. We were trying to get the name of that particular fish/coral so that we can write it down into our dive log book (Yes, divers have log book!). Some of the fishes look so similar, we get to fight over which is which, it was FUN!! :)

Before I end the post, I'd like to show this to you. We saw a gigantic humphead fish. Compare it with the normal size fishes in the photo and you'll see how many times the humphead fish is bigger. It is so big I dare not go any closer.

The yellow fish is a normal size fish