Okay, after seeing all the cool pool shots that some of the members are posting, and after a few days of less than stellar sealife images, I turned my camera on a kid in the pool. I had very low expectations (thank God!) but was even more intrigued about how to "do it better" next time after looking at the images. Certainly the distortion at 10mm is terrible. Should I try shooting it at the 17mm end of my lens or switch to my 12-24? What about light? Trying to warm the skin tones without screwing up the blue sky was eluding me also. I'm all ears so fire at will....

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Your post looks over-exposed: a slight under-exposure beneath the water helps. I would consider using shutter priority and metering from the subject.

I've also used a modified HDR technique to further underexpose the above-water element (often just using curves on a Photoshop adjustment layer with a layer mask over the underwater part).

I found graduated filters too restrictive, tho' in bright daylight they may be the best option.

You can be creative with the distortion, otherwise you will have to use a longer focal length.

A lot of the pool images posted use carefully controlled artificial lighting, and, if you look carefully, position the model parallel to the focal plane and seem to me to use a focal length of about 20mm.

Tim

Thanks Tim! I had so much fun that I want to keep at it but with improved results. I, too, had thought about a graduated filter but figured I'd make a mess of that. Now that I've seen what I got the first time around, I can make some changes next shoot with your suggestions.

I've used the graduated filter in Lightroom 2.4 to darken the sky when doing over/unders, with decent results.

Good tip! Thanks Natalie!

Hey!

Great shots!

In the first shot - you have those lovely dappled light rays which i'm obbessed with. I find it best to meter for those light rays themselves as they'll really make or break an image. The light rays are slightly underexposed in your image - this isn't neccessarily bad. Open the file in photoshop or lightroom etc and do a highlight adjustment and see if you can't bring some light into them. Also, try a slight curves adjustment and darken the darks a smidget or two. or just fling me the file at cjmero@gmail.com and ill have a go at it and send it back as a psd file so you can see the adjustments.

"A lot of the pool images posted use carefully controlled artificial lighting, and, if you look carefully, position the model parallel to the focal plane and seem to me to use a focal length of about 20mm" - yep , exactly right. I shoot at 17mm.

That first shots got a lot of charm to it. Forget the rules of "just dodging and burning" etc for wildlife photography. This is pool work. Anything goes. Give it another run through your post production and work the tones a bit more. I'd dodge the white shades above water and see if you can't do a seperate saturation adjustment layer on the sky. It'll take a bit of work but it'll be worth it.

Great model by the way,

Cheers!

Cal