Is external lighting essential for photography in southern waters?

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Breathing is cheating

Depends how deep you are. Normal depths on a sunny day (in my experience) no, but at deeper depths you might want an off-camera flash especially with a small lens. Mucky water will also light up with a flash, which might not be the photo you're trying to take.

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Civilisation ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

gday ash, in my limited experience i've only been using the flash or led light for macro stuff. anything further than a couple of feet away starts to show up every fleck of crap floating in the water when you use a flash. i guess in really clear water a flash would go ok but i've mostly only heard fairy tails about "clear water" down this way.

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Do you know what really makes me smile? Facial muscles.

Maybe the strobes used as external lighting work differently from regular camera flashes? http://www.elasmodiver.com/Shark%20Phot ... %20Use.htm The shots taken here look like similar water and environments to ours, where it's suggested using a wide strobe spread for use in water with heaps of crap in it.

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Breathing is cheating

As long as your camera has a diffuser for the internal flash it'll be plenty good enough! If your really serious about it then it might be worth looking into but pics turn out fine with stock ones. It makes a huge difference swimming around with it with arms hanging out to just a camera on it's own, you'd wanna really be just focussing on photography and not spearing at the same time.

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Like a farken underwater ninja!

The fish were blinded by overexposure to his pure awesomeness!

will have to find the link for you but i came across a site with some tips for underwater photography that was pretty good. In it they were saying that having the lighting from wide angles (e.g. out on those arm thingy's) reduces how much the floaty bits show up because of being lit from the side rather than a standard flash where the light is hitting the objects straight on infront of the lens.. i'l find the link....

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Do you know what really makes me smile? Facial muscles.

Good tip in that shark article on the side lighting, I wonder how far to the side it has to be. An important note, nowdays with digital photography and processing, a colour cast (funny colours over the whole picture, such as in the top-left ray picture) can be lessened or completely fixed relatively easily. Especially if you shoot in RAW. Likewise underexposure (picture being too dark) is much much less of a problem than with film, the dark areas preserve a lot of detail that can brought out in processing. Especially for photos shot in RAW. Both colour casts and underexposure can occur underwater shooting without a flash.
I do these sorts of processing routinely for my above water cameras, unfortunately my old underwater compact doesn't shoot RAW but I have some success working from the jpgs (eg. my profile pic).

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Civilisation ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

I always use the flash when underwater. It allows for smaller aperture and shorter exposure times, resulting in crisper photos. Plus you get better colour reproduction.

There does seem to be a massive difference between the lit and non-lit shots though, but strobes are expensive, especially for strobes with a wide angle ($700+ per unit). So I think for at least a little while I'll be using just the camera and a housing. On some dives I would be going dedicated photographer (potentially in exchange for some of the loot).

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Breathing is cheating

Until the camera has a built-in flash, it will be big enough! If serious then it may be useful, but the photos appear to be many options for them. It makes a huge difference between swimming with a camera hanging from his hands. Thus the camera set up you can do this type.

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