Assignment 8: Portraiture and Light

Krista Doersch: Seamount

I had a lot of fun with this assignment and put together about 40 underwater pictures I've taken on dives this quarter. I put it together manually in photoshop and kind of really liked the puzzle of matching up similar colors to make it look like one image from a distance.

I enjoyed the freedom to make creatures as big or small as I wanted to emphasize just how awesome California's kelp forests are. I also included a picture my dive buddy took of me (mid left with the pink snorkel)!

The camera I used is an Olympus Stylus Tough 8000, with an underwater housing. For the foreground I used mostly the macro setting and flash. On one of the dives, I forgot the flash diffuser which is why some photos have harsh black edges.

The different shades of blue for the open water are because of varying dive conditions (storms kick up debris or phytoplankton blooms make the water look green). In photos taken deeper without flash, I used photoshop to put back in some reds to compensate for the wavelengths lost at depth.