reflected light is minimal. This can make the total scene illu- mination balance a potential challenge. However, this too can be solved by employing flash fill. When I first began to experiment with my D200, I shot ISO 200 (for lowest noise), f16 (to achieve maximum subject sharpness above and below the water while not requiring a shutter speed slower than 1/30 second) and Aperture Priority (where shutter speed “floats” to accommodate correct exposure with fixed ISO and aperture). I also set the camera to Matrix Metering, which evaluates the entire scene for proper exposure and, Point Autofocus specifically for the UW subject. This combination of settings gave me sufficient shutter speeds to enable sharp images but sometimes resulted in an inability to obtain proper exposure across the entire scene. In addition, I often had subject softness above the water because I could not shoot a smaller aperture without getting too slow on shutter speed. And, a higher ISO in my early camera body produced unacceptable noise. Still, because I could literally shoot until the card was full or the battery drained, I’d return with a handful of images for which the editors would clamor. To solve the luminosity balance issue I began shooting PHOTO PRO continued
splits with a single strobe mounted directly to the housing for flash fill on either the surface or UW subject. With the camera set to Rear Sync (which allowed for ambient light fill to the background) and a change to Spot Metering for the UW subject, I was able to achieve much better total scene ex- posure balance. To fix my occasional image softness issue on one half of the scene, I switched from autofocus to fixing the focus manually at a distance just beyond where autofocus would have locked on my UW subject (taking a page from the Nikonos handbook using the field of focus markings on the lens barrel). This shifted the field of focus enough to now enable sharp focus on both the UW and surface subject. The third physics concern with split shooting is relatively simple to solve. Fisheye lenses provide a unique, often unnatural image perspective at normal shooting distances. They bend lines with a barreling effect on subjects becoming most pronounced the further the subject is from the center line of focus. And, they create a magnified, false perspective of subject distance the farther the subject is from the lens. But we know from our UW shooting that by getting super close to our subjects we can actually use these effects to our
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