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UW PHOTOGRAPHY
As Wide as it Gets
feature and photography Simone Caprodossi
Here is a little photography feature to introduce
a new lens that I believe creates great new
underwater photography possibilities and gives
us an excuse to have a few more shots from
our amazing Sudan trip as the article featured
on pages 42-57 was packed to the max.
My new favourite underwater toy is the Canon
ES 8-15 fisheye zoom. I use it on a full frame
Canon 5D Mark 3 in a Subal underwater
housing with 2 Inon YS 240 strobes. It can be
used with the same dome port that is used
for the regular wideangle lenses such as the
16-35. On a cropped sensor SLR (anything
different from Canon other than the 5D, 6D
or 1D) it will lose some of the width and the
full circular effect, but will still be as wide as it
gets for your system.
Within the pages to follow, you will find examples of some images I like
most that exemplify subjects I believe this lens works really well for.
A first great subject is a beautiful reef with plenty of fish, ideally
at dusk or dawn as the 8mm with clear visibility allows you to
capture all the way from the surface light, down to 25-30
meters depth. It is great to have a diver in the shot to get a
sense of proportion and the grandeur of the reef.
Shaab Rumi Reef: 8mm, F/11, 1/100, ISO 400,
2 strobes full power.
It is not an everyday lens, but with the right
subjects I really think it enables amazing new
photo opportunities that neither the 16-35
or a 14mm or 15mm fix fisheye lens can. The
beauty of having it as a zoom lens is that it
allows you to play with the full circular fisheye
at the 8mm end and get the circular image
when the subject is right for it, but then you
can swing it back to 15 and basically have a
really wide wide-angle for more normal
looking seascapes or fish portraits that will
work for most of the dive. Unfortunately at the
moment, only Canon offers a fisheye zoom,
so to get the circular effect on other camera
systems, you would need to use the fixed 8mm
fisheye which means you will be stuck with the
effect for the duration of your dive.
It took me several trials and errors to get it to
work correctly, so here are 5 tips not to repeat
if you have started using it or will start using it:
1. Remove the sun shade from the dome
port or else at 8mm, you‘ll get a weird
black shape instead of your nice circle.
2. Be very careful with strobe positioning. You
need to stretch them well out of the field
of view of the lens or you’ll get light bursts
in your photo, if not the strobes themselves.
3. Don’t go too far with pointing strobes
away to avoid issues made in point 2
above, because then you risk having heavily
shaded areas where the back of the dome
port shades the photo from the strobe
lights.
4. Mind yourself, as you can easily get your
fins and legs in as part of the bottom of
the shot.
5. To readdress 2, 3 and 4, keep checking your
shots after taking them until you know the
setup is right as that’s really the only way to
be sure you have got it, especially at first.
Trust me, I have trashed several sets of
images due to skipping these points.
32 DIVERS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, SEPTEMBER 2013
SEPTEMBER 2013, DIVERS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
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