Thailand 2010 (I)

Here’s an initial selection of photographs from my 2010 Diving Vacation to Phuket… I have cheated a little here and pulled together a selection of my favourite shots from a little over one week’s worth of diving. (Although in truth I did not take the camera on every dive).

This time I have not bothered with the strobe, and instead am using the Canon G9’s built in flash and the diffuser that Canon supply with the waterproof case. There are a few lessons to learn: it’s range is so much more limited than the external strobe that it is really only suitable for Macro or fill-in work. Also, the shape of the housing means that anything in the “bottom right” corner of the frame will likely be cast in shadow because of the way that the flash is limited in scope.

As a result you soon learn to compose the shot with your intended subject in the top left corner of each frame, and then to rely on the G9’s 12.2 Megapixels to permit some judicious cropping to get the shot you want.

Not exactly ideal, but the results below are an order of magnitude better than anything achieved with the strobe. Just one challenge remains, and that is the ability to get an in-focus shot of a Clown Fish in it’s host anemone’s tentacles. There’s just too much moving material there – it confuses the Camera’s auto-focus system and as a result the fish is invariably blurred. But the rest of the shots are pretty darned good…

Happy Days…