Photos, Red Sea, September 2006

These are some photographs from a Bath Dive Centre liveaboard trip to the Red Sea in September 2006 on Emperor's MY Fraser. We visited the Brothers, Daedalus, Elphinstone and a few other reefs. The weather was fairly rough and the currents rather unpredictable, but overall a blisful week's diving!

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. To reduce the shutter time in low lighting conditions, I set the sensitivity to ISO 200. I also experimented with RAW mode. This results in much larger files so that about 78 will fit onto a 1 Gb card vs 478 for Jpeg. RAW mode gives you more control when using the flash to highlight foreground detail. Using P mode with flash and a manual white balance may result in images that are too red. One final thought - it is very easy to get the focus wrong, particularly when the subject is moving.