Aug 272013
 

Scurion in Pines Cave

About the Cave

Pines has a large cavern zone, and some interesting tunnels after you wind your way down the side of the rockpile. With some nice clay down in the deep zone, interesting critters up in the shallow and very easy stairs to the water it’s a fun and relaxed dive. You can see my close up yabby shots from the afternoon dive here.

Sunlight in Pines

About the dive

This dive was the first of the weekend, a checkout on my newly-replaced camera and the first time that I’d been in Pines in ages. Despite it being so popular and regularly dived, I have very few shots that I’m happy with from here. This dive was a nice chance to play around and get some different views. Combining strobe and ambient light in cave entrances is always good for testing out how low the shutter speed can go before the images get blurry.

About the photo

I had a bunch of new little camera pieces turn up while my camera was out of action after the flood (of course). One of these was a pair of tinted diffusers for my Inon Z240s – you can see the WetPixel review of these here. I don’t normally use diffusers on the strobes in the clear water caves, saving them for dirtier waters. And the tint in these diffusers is designed to warm up the strobe-lit foreground for wide angle shots in the ocean, making the naturally lit background appear cooler and bluer. On the other hand, they had just turned up, it was a check out dive, and why not?

I decided that a cave was as good a place as any to try them out. A friendly commenter pointed out a while back that I could try different temperature strobe light to add more depth to my shots. I decided to use them on the on camera strobes, hoping the off camera strobes would look bluer by comparison. The effect is subtle but I love the colour of the foreground rocks and the blue water behind in the above shot, so I guess this setup is a winner.

I’m looking forward to testing them out in the ocean, and trying a few different on-camera, off-camera combinations in the caves. I have a feeling macro shots with one tinted and one untinted strobe might work for the right subjects. That must mean it’s time to go diving.

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