Today was a day of deep diving. First dive was at 150ft. Vis was amazing, water was the most beautiful blue ever. But all my pictures were crap because I was not feeling so great.(I was particularly sensitive to nitrogen narcosis today) So I decided that it would be a good chance to experiment with stacked magic filters for my second dive to lessen the mental work.

It turned out that the second dive the vis was bad, and the water was greenish. Probably not the best conditions. I'll let you be the judge as to how much magic happens at this depth.

Camera settings 1/15th F/2.8 ISO 800 doubble stacked magic filters.

ACR didnt do nearly as well at getting a good WB as canon DPP so RAW conversion was done in DPP.

That is way better than I would have thought.....

Yes, the colour is not too bad, but I am not happy at all with my camera's performance at ISO800.

They look ok at this size, but at larger sizes the noise is pretty bad.

I've shot at ISO 800 above water. It's not great but not too bad. I think part of the problem in your situation is that even with stacked magic filters the white balance has to amplify the red channel quite a bit and makes the noise worst.

While that is certainly part of it, the noise was unacceptable to me even before WB correction. Another factor was that they are underexposed by 1 stop. I should have used ISO1600. But I just couldnt make myself do it.

I was not surprized that I was not happy with the noise. Under most circumstances I refuse to use anything but ISO100. Even 200 is too noisy when I am conserned with image quality and at 400 I normally dont even bother.

Noise is one (of only two) feature that I look forward to improving when I eventually upgrade cameras.

Looks like the 5D is the camera for you.

Can you post a cropped 100% of the red channel? I would think that it would be really bad...?

I've found deep-water white-balanced stuff to be usable only for web display.

Yep, red is the worst by far, but the blue and green are unacceptable to me as well. Nothing that neat image couldnt fix but it still buggs me.

Wow. Those results are very impressive considering you are more than twice the maximum depth of the filter - and there must have been next to no red light at all. I am amazed that anything came out at all!

Alex

Has anyone tried this filter on big animals?

Joe

I think it will be awesome on whales, dolphins etc. I know we have sold filters to people who specialise in such critters. So you might start seeing images about the place. But I am not prepared to divulge names!

On Friday I shot Mantas with the filter in Bali:
http://www.amustard.com/bali_magic/

Alex

I'm impressed too. I bring my own light under such conditions.

For all practical purposes there is no red at the depth you were at. I would think that a warming filter would just cut the amount of light available for the exposure forcing you to use a higher ISO with minimal benefits yet your images do have some warm colors, especially yellow.