One thing I forgot to describe the other day when I posted about the Black Jack B-17 wreck was the lighting tools I took down with me.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I set my camera to a high ISO in anticipation of dark conditions at a depth of 40 metres. This allowed me take photographs without using strobes.

It’s not all that apparent from the sepia-toned images I posted before, but there was a considerable amount of stuff in the water, so controlling backscatter would have been a challenge. I’m sure it would’ve been possible to take reasonably clean images with strobe light, but it would’ve taken time, which is something I didn’t have at that depth.

Instead of using strobes, I took a couple of Sola 1200 lights down, mounted on Ultralight arms in place of my strobes.

Why did I do this? To add a hint of light and colour for considerably less effort and lower risk of creating backscatter than using strobes:

Julian taking a photo of the Black Jack B-17 wreck

As you can see from the photo above, the Sola 1200 lights allowed me to light Julian a bit, as well as the nose of the plane. I got some added light from Julian, who had one of my Sola 600 lights mounted on his camera, pointing at the plane.

There’s nowhere near the amount of light and colour that strobes could generate, but in this circumstance, it was a heckuva lot quicker and simpler than fiddling with strobes. There’s a lot to be said for quick-and-easy.

Here’s another photo, where I was able to isolate one of the props and get really close, concentrating both lights on a single area to bring out more colour:

Prop of Black Jack B17 bomber wreck at 40m, lit with Sola 1200

As an unanticipated side benefit, this lighting set-up also came in handy for shooing Craig away when he cut in front of me, pointing at his camera while babbling incoherently (normal behaviour for him):

Craig asking me for photo advice at 40 metres!

I aimed the Sola lights directly for his face, mostly with the hope of getting him out of my way, but in doing so, I managed to add a nice, selective highlight to bring out his dopey expression, something that would have been more difficult to achieve with strobes.

None of this means that you should ditch your strobes! But if you find yourself in a similar situation or want to try something a bit different, this might be worth a go.

(Disclosure: Sola 1200 and Sola 600 lights provided by Scubacam and Light and Motion.)

I’m not big on wrecks. I know a lot of people are, including many of my friends, but I’m already obsessed with marine life, and I figure one obsession is more than enough.

On the final of the three legs of this adventure however, I had to give in (sigh), and we visited a couple of wrecks, including this well-known site at Cape Vogel, where a B-17 bomber known as Black Jack sits at 40 metres.

Black Jack B-17 bomber wreck at 40 metres.
Bob Halstead above, Craig Dewit near the prop, Julian Cohen at the nose

Given the depth, we didn’t have much time. The visibility didn’t look all that great, so I decided to skip the strobes and just go with high ISO. Before jumping in, I took a guess and set the ISO at 2500, with f8 aperture and 1/100 shutter…which happened to work out perfectly.

The main advantage of doing this is that I didn’t have to worry about backscatter or lighting such an inherently dark scene. Also, with limited time at depth and the mind-numbing effects of narcosis, I didn’t need to worry about strobe settings, only camera settings. Had I guessed incorrectly about the exposure, it would have just required a tiny bit of fiddling to figure out what would work.

The primary disadvantage is added grain/ noise. But DSLR sensors are good enough these days that the results are perfectly acceptable to me under certain circumstances…like this one.

Finally, while the original files look decent in colour, I decided to convert these two to sepia tone to imbue the images with a vintage mood I felt appropriate for the subject.

Julian taking a photo of the Black Jack B-17 wreck