Blenny & Anemones

[David Chauvin]

From this weekend off of the Louisiana coast,,,,,,these small tesselated blennies hang out in the shallower depths. This was around 25 feet down. The surge from wave action at this shallow depth made holding my position in the water and composition a challenge.

Sea & Sea DX-1G, 1/640 sec, f16, iso 100, twin strobes, full frame

David
South Louisiana

http://www.pbase.com/dgc_arts/image/100879368.jpg

[David Chauvin]

Sorry but there seems to be a problem with the larger view.:confused:

OK,,,,,,I've got it now! :o

[Kaushik Balakumar]

Absolutely beautiful. Seldom we get to see such beautiful images of sea-life.
Liked the fish peeking out from the top-right.

[Julie Kenward]

David, what an interesting underwater image! You managed to get some great detail throughout - no doubt that f16 setting helped you out there! The composition is really nice as well, especially considering the challenging circumstances. My one suggestion might be to tone down the lightest tones a bit to give the image a deeper, more saturated contrast throughout.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi David,
I really like this compositionally......but agreed with Julie that the one side was a bit bright. I hope you don't mind.....but I tried to balance out the light a bit more. I did a dup BG layer and selected the brightest area using the lasso......wasn't too neat.......then I used select>color range. ........(black matte is the preview)...fuzzinnes was around 29..........and selected the whole area holding down the shift key and adding to the selection..........added a layer mask.......and hit multiply under the mode.........slid opacity to around 50.......and then filter> blur> gaussian.......around 8.5 was enough to smotth the edge. then I adjusted the levels a bit brighter (around 10 pts on the mid tone slider)........to lighten the fish.....selectively sharpened the fish......and then a small pass of sharpening on the rest.
Robert may chime in with an easier way (I hope).......but i did want to at least tell you how I achieved the results.
Let me know what you think overall.
What I am suggeting are just tweaks to a very nicely composed image!
PS Jpeg compression was around 60 quality.......so I lost a bit that you will be able to retain in the original.

[anita ray]

I love blennies and they are fun to shoot! Nice job.
Where do you dive in Louisiana?