Photos, Red Sea, September 2005

These are some photographs from a BSAC 33 Bath subaqua club diving trip to the Red Sea in September 2005 on a Tony Backhust Cruise and Stay package to Marsa Alam.

I took the pictures with a Canon Powershot s60 using the Canon WP-DC40 waterproof case. For the most part I used manual calibration of white balance, and the Program AE mode. I later used the GIMP to enhance the colour/contrast range via the Tools | Color tools | Levels | auto feature, and then tweaked things further as necessary. I wasn't as disciplined at calibrating the white balance as I should have been, and this accounts for some of the bluish shots. I also experimented with Canon's underwater white balance setting, but it isn't nearly as good as manual calibration on a white plastic sheet. To reduce the shutter time in low lighting conditions, I set the sensitivity to ISO 100. I used jhead with the autorot option to rotate the images to the way they were taken, and mogrify to scale the images. One final thought - for close ups, it is very easy to get the focus wrong, and I need to remember to check and if necessary use manual focusing via the MF button.