Live Updates: Canon Collective/Scubapix imaging event at Heron Island
Day 3
The third day of the Canon Collective/Scubapix-Nauticam Australia Australia event featured the time-proven combination of being in the water and taking pictures!
The day started with the participants borrowing gear from the Canon and Nauticam for the day. Scubapix-Nauticam Australia’s Peter Mooney gave a talk on housing use.
The participants and I went out for an early dive at an amazing coral outcrop or bommie called originally “Heron Bommie.”
It is a series of coral pinnacles that harbour a plethora of photographic subject, from nudibranchs through to mantas.
It had a very photogenic school of harlequin sweetlips (Plectorhinchus chaetodonoides)
The event’s participants are all capturing some great imagery
The reef has lots of life:
A short run brought us back to Heron Island Resort, where lenses were changed and ideas shared and discussed.
The morning dive was so good, we elected to return the same site in the afternoon!
It was an ideal place to try out a new/prototype Nauticam conversion lens. The W2M is designed to be used with a 60mm macro lens on a full frame camera. It converts the field of view to 120°. When used with a flip diopter, it allows the shooter to go from macro (or super macro if a macro conversion lens is used) through two wide angle.
Optically, I was using it on a cropped sensor camera, so it needs more experimentation to be sure, but it seems very good.
Hence I was able to go from shooting wide angle scenics of turtles to macro images of nudibranchs on the same dive.
The Canon Collective always host a gallery exhibition of participant’s work at the end of there events. To this end, they had shipped in a large format printer to Heron Island Resort.
Hence Canon’s Greg Sullavan presented a workshop on preparing images for printing retouching in order to get the best results from an image once it is printed. There was lots of information for both relative newcomer and seasoned pro.
Tomorrow is the final day of the event, with the gallery show in the evening.