Pictures from Florida Cave Diving

[ethanb]

I'm just back from a week of cave diving in Florida with Tami Thomsen and Paul (WIDiver_Paul). We spent five days in Luraville, two in Marianna, and two surveying a spring in Alabama. Tami was teaching a class, so I dove with Paul most of the week. The weather was decent and the viz was great.

I brought along my camera, the Canon s410 in a Canon DC800 housing (discussed in an earlier thread), and finally got some undewater pictures I'm happy with. It's amazing how much better it works in clear water, even with low light. For natural light photos, the exposure time is still fairly long (what do you except with a tiny sensor), but I could get good results by bracing the camera against
rocks. Flash photos are better, but still aren't that great - the strobe is too close to the lens and I get tons of backscatter, except when I'm very close. Hopefully an external flash and/or wide-angle lens will solve this. The flash will let me work further away without backscatter, and the wide-angle lens will let me work closer without accidently "chopping off parts."

Paul is the subject is all of these photos, except for a few of the far-away silhouettes. The images were processed in Photoshop, using some degree of auto-contrast and auto-color and unsharp mask (typical settings 125%/1.0/3.0). I'm not totally happy with the results of the processing - I did it at work on a computer with a junky monitor and I think I overdid the sharpening a bit.

Ginnie Springs:










Peacock:




Twin Spring:




Jackson Blue:
















Shangri la:


Critters:




Busted Trailer Tongue: (6:30 AM the morning after Thanksgiving, on I-75 near Corbin, Kentucky)