Sharks In Truk

[redkane]

I shot this picture while on the Odyssey in Truk this year. I was just wanting to get some feedback on what people thought of the picture and ways to improve it. I shot it using a D200 in an Ikelite housing. I was using a 12-24 Nikon lens set at f/8 ISO 200 with a shutter speed of 1/125 set as 12mm.

Thanks for any input

[Papa Bear]

Just my opinion, but composition could have been better and it might have helped the excessive noise. I would have say closer is better and the sun should have been in the upper right corner, with maybe a quarter of it showing. Unless it is a 4 meter shark, the small ones look to far away with the wide angel. It might be a little over exposed, but not bad, I would have liked to see the same shot at 22mm a lot closer to the action and with the sun in the right place. Good job overall!

[Jonathan Bird]

In the spirit of constructive feedback, I'll give my honest appraisal.

You have followed a common mistake in composition of simply bullseye-ing the main subject, leaving the rest of the frame to fall where it does, so you have sharks cut in half. I realize that when things are moving this way and that, you can't get the perfect composition as if you were composing a sunset on a tripod. You just keep shooting until you get the right alignment of subjects. Sometimes with a lot of sharks, the ideal composition is random luck because there is just too much moving in the frame. Sometimes the ideal composition just never happens in a situation like this and you get what you get.

I like the use of the sun, and if this were a film image, it would look nice, but the D200 (like most digital cameras) doesn't handle the sunburst well at all, so you have the typical digital washout ring around the sun, which somewhat spoils the effect in my opinion. Were I shooting this scene, I would keep the sun itself out of the shot, keeping it just above the frame, using just the sun rays in the image.

Overall not a bad effort, and a good example of both the limitations of digital (sun) and advantages (you could sit there and shoot a zillion shots until you got the right one).

Jonathan