Alex Mustard breaks paradigm

Many of us have tried just the recallibration of the color-temperatur through manual white-balance. But the results were not always convicing when taking your greycard down on the dive. Some of the images had these strange color-profile as if they were taken on dry land. When Alex was investigating on this technique with his Nikon D100, he made a genious move! With the mix of convetional filters together with the manual white-balance he was able to make a break-trough in digital underwater photography crushing the paradigm that strobes or divelights are indispensable for colorful shots.

The technique is derived from underwater videography. To get colorful and natural looking movies underwater videographers use red filters or strong dive-lights. In shallow water they often prefer a red filter. So why not playing around with filters in underwater photography, too?

But just using a red or any other filter causes different color saturation on different depths, which may result in too colorful ("reddish") pictures. Because filters cannot adapt to the normal ambient light. They always add their color to the available light. This means you can use these filters only at a certain depths where you vaguely know the light conditions.

How can you use a filter at different depths? This is were Alex started to experiment with quite a success. He used the capability of digital cameras to manual white balance. He took a grey slate down underwater and recalibrated the white balance for every new shot if it was on a different depth. In combination with the filter the results are showing very natural colors.

In fact his experiments look quite natural and have not been manipulated. The photos below are all directly out of his camra. Alex Mustard comments his results as follows: "This is a really exciting technique for digital photographers because you cannot easily get these results on film. The technique is so easy to use that you could try it on your first dive with a digital camera!"

very natural looking skin color	look at this rock - it rocks with these colors
look at these color - even in the background	a) is sunlight b) is grey card white balance c) is GC white balance 1 stop warmer d) is GC white balance 1 stop cooler

• more natural looking pictures
• the complete pictures is colored and not only the part that normally is filled with the strobe light

These technique is still very young and in a very experimental phase, but the samples above are looking quite promising and we are curious what results come up in the not to distant future. Thanks to Alex, who provided and shared this information with the community of digital underwater photographers. Please not that all the photos are copyrighted by him and do not forget to conact him prior to any publication.

A full description of this technique will be published in the next issue of the uwpmag. All pictures were taken with a Nikon D100 in a Subal D10 housing.