Archive for February, 2012


Britannia Beach, Feb ’12

Coastguard Cutter Wreck

A large propeller, with a Lingcod sitting on it.

A new site was recently discovered by the Shipwreck Exploration and Conservation Society, containing several wrecks which have sunk over the past few years. Some friends had dove it the previous week, and located lots of interesting things. Finally being free and not having to work on a weekend, I joined them this past weekend to explore the sites.

As a quick note to any divers who may be heading out to these wrecks, they have many fragile parts and there are several Lingcod egg masses in the area. Please be careful to not damage these wrecks, or disturb the endangered life in an area slowly recovering from the damage done over the years by the mine run-off. Good buoyancy and and propulsion skills are a must, as these will quickly disintegrate from too many unskilled divers abusing this site.

Coastguard Cutter Wreck

Looking along the bow of the coastguard cutter wreck

Initially we dove a site away from the two main wrecks, and explored some smaller sunken boats and a bunch of “junk”. In the top 30 or so feet near our exit point, there was a rock bed which held a nice amount of life, providing opportunities for some nice macro photography.

It was really interesting diving the two wrecks, however without a wide angle lens, and a camera that doesn’t handle poor light that well, taking photos of the wreck was difficult. I managed to get some good shots after playing around with settings however. Fiddling around with the white balancing of the RAW photos in UFRaw yielded some interesting results, but ultimately I think black and white provided the best results for the wreck photos. I was left wishing I had a wide-angle lens, and a camera with better low light sensitivity…

Shrimp

A neat shrimp, just over 1 inch in length. I must have taken 30 photos with various settings to get it just right...

 

Swimming up and down the two wrecks provided for some interesting macro opportunities as well, as life is taking hold on them. From some larger nudibranchs, various fish, and tonnes of shrimp. These made me wish I had a macro lens! I think I might opt for some macro wet lenses for my case in the next little while…

Once again, I urge the utmost caution with this site. It’s very fragile, and will deteriorate very quickly if we as a dive community do not take care of it.

Below are the rest of the photos:

 

 

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Tutorial Links

The following are some tutorials I’ve found useful in learning the unique skills of underwater photography. Many of the tutorials are geared towards compact cameras as opposed to DSLR, some are more generic and cover both DSLR and compact cameras. I’ll add links to this list as I find new resources.

 

  1. Guide to Underwater Photography – Perhaps one of the best resources I’ve found. This site covers topics ranging from getting started to advanced techniques, compact cameras to DSLRs, and more. There is also a good discussion on strobes and strobe positioning. A very highly recommended read.
  2. Canon G11/G12 and S90/S95 Underwater Photography – A useful link for Canon Camera compact cameras.  Although it is geared towards the Powershot G11, the G10, G12, S90, S95, etc are very similar cameras and the discussion is applicable to those cameras as well.