Midnight Snapper

Attachment 149150

I've not spent too much time in this section recently - more avian for me, but I thought I'd throw one in for this months theme.

This is an adult midnight snapper, probably around 50-60 cm in length, that was checking me out as I floated along the reef. Beautiful looking fish that 'glow' in the right light. This one was comfortable with a close approach, and it was only the fixed focal length and his size that prevented me from getting closer - this was just under 1 metre away, so a bit further than ideal for underwater.

Slight crop from below and from the right for comp, nothing more up top

Canon 7d in a Subal housing
60mm macro
ISO 200, 1/200th, f5.6
2 x inon z240 external strobes fitted with warming filters to deepen the blues in the BG

Mike

Hi Mike great that you post an UW frame , sadly you are the only on who seems to do that in here.
This nice Snapper fits very well to the theme.Like the comp and the overall color palette , i just love the marine life for its great diversity and mostly very colorful . I breed stony corals at work and i love all the complexity of them in their life circle .Have you any images of Sea Horses or Leafy Sea Dragons , if you have i would love to see a posting from you .
There is so much to look at in this portrait with all this colorful lines ,dots and even the scales of the fish are visible . Nice job in getting this shot :cheers:.
But it was not me , the so called nit picker , if i do not see some potential for improving this image in terms of tone/color/ detail and sharpness . So this is just what i think where it can go if wanted , i could have gone a tad too far but to illustrate ......... it is good enough for me.
Hope you do not mind .

TFS Andreas

Wow Mike. This is so cool. Very bright and colourful with amazing clarity and sharpness. TFS.

Hello Mike!

You have "snapped" this one - superb colours, beautifully presented, a joy to view - congratulations my friend!!!

Kind regards,

Thanks for looking and commenting,

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Andreas Liedmann

Hi Mike great that you post an UW frame , sadly you are the only on who seems to do that in here.
This nice Snapper fits very well to the theme.Like the comp and the overall color palette , i just love the marine life for its great diversity and mostly very colorful . I breed stony corals at work and i love all the complexity of them in their life circle .Have you any images of Sea Horses or Leafy Sea Dragons , if you have i would love to see a posting from you .
There is so much to look at in this portrait with all this colorful lines ,dots and even the scales of the fish are visible . Nice job in getting this shot :cheers:.
But it was not me , the so called nit picker , if i do not see some potential for improving this image in terms of tone/color/ detail and sharpness . So this is just what i think where it can go if wanted , i could have gone a tad too far but to illustrate ......... it is good enough for me.
Hope you do not mind .

TFS Andreas

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Thanks for the edit Andreas, always good to see your image through someone else's eyes. For me, I think the optimum image would be somewhere between the 2 versions, I think you've just pushed things a little too far compared to the reality of the scene. What changes did you make for your RP?

Hi Mike ,as i said i could have gone too far :bg3:, and you are the photographer you have to say how far you like to go .I just give suggestions without being the author of the image so i look at this from the purely technical side and that is oh so subjective !!!

The edits i made are rather complex if you do not know about it ...... so i try to explain simple

Basically i darkened the HL and opened up shadow at first and added a bit of local contrast . It is an action i use very often on my and others low res files .Depending on the file i play with the opacity of the layers .
The next step has been the color pushing with a channel mixer adjustment layer ( google " channel mixer Velvia "to find out more ) duplicate the layer and set one to saturation blend mode and the other one to luminosity blend mode ! play with the layer opacity !!
Last step was the sharpening , i used a High Pass layer with a 0,2 px radius and set the blend mode to "Vivid Light " and set the opacity to 66 % .

In the end i had a layer stack of 7 layers , put them them all in a group and add layer mask to mask out the BKG from the edits .

Sounds very complicated i guess , but took me roughly 2 min.

Cheers Andreas

Hi Mike - another excellent underwater image. Love the vibrant colors here and it certainly fits the theme. I agree that perhaps somewhere between your op and Andreas' rp would work best. Nice one overall.

TFS,
Rachel