Rorschach Test
I had to check the spelling. Sometimes I amaze myself. I mean most of the time I am happy to have some images that are good. My family thinks that it’s because I shoot and shoot. By sheer volume of images you have to get one or two. Right? Or, “even a blind squirrel gets a nut sometimes.” Underwater photography is the newest venture. I think I have, family, landscapes, street photography and so forth, going pretty well. Underwater, it’s a completely different deal. It’s like being back in BxW. You have to visualize and then see what you have on the negative. I don’t check the LCD while shooting. No time, too lazy, not interested, who knows. I just don’t really look until the shoot is over. So about 6 hours after the dive and when I could finally sit down and see the day’s shoot…. wow! This is my second shoot and I’m still in total experimental mode. It used to be that film cameras held 36 shots and then you were done. Digital has made everyone an underwater photographer. Coral is not so much a challenge. It doesn’t move. Fish, that’s an entirely new learning curve. They move. You move. There’s color and focus issues to work through.
Lionfish on a coral wall swimming upside down. I got enough problems of my own swimming right side up. Fortunately it swims slowly. No need to hurry. It’s dangerous to get close. Color was absolutely miserable last week. Everything was monotone blue green. No amount of Photoshop made much out of anything. My best shots were in 2 feet of water. Ha! You don’t need scuba gear for that. This week I turned on the flash, hooked up the flash diffuser (’cause it came with the housing), prayed the water would not fry my Canon G11, and started shooting from the hip at wide angle. There’s really no practical way for me to compose at this point in the learning. I can’t tell you how surprised I was to get this coral color using the flash. At this depth everything had the blue green monotone. Even Mr Lionfish was monotone. So I could say I knew it all along. But here’s one more instance in which I got very lucky. If it’s any help the motto from my training days as a neurosurgery resident is, “It’s better to be lucky than good.” It’s not always brain surgery that I do.
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