After five months of not getting my much needed #VitaminSEA, I was able to tag along with two friends on a day trip to Sombrero Island. We did a total of three dives on Saturday and although I’ve had the RX100 for more than two years, this was the first time I actually went all-out with wide angle photography. The previous dives always had some technical malfunction with the strobes and I wasn’t sure whether it had more to do with wrong prepping or actual hardware failure — my left strobe always had issues. As it turns out, the strobe wasn’t set to shoot as slave.
Two dives, 202 photos and over 140 minutes of bottom time. Sharing three shots (out of 202!!) from the weekend dive. We kicked off from Anilao PHOTO Hotel with Ivan Manzanares. Not only is he a spotter, he’s adept with a camera so he helped jog back my understanding of shooting with a P&S from 3 months of absence from Vitamin Sea.
As much as I prefer shooting video on the ‘ol RX-100, macro photography has become a default posit in my dive schedule as of late. This is mostly because the dive sites I’ve been frequenting with Steve Tan are considered playgrounds for all things small. And really, there’s nothing more challenging than finding a shrimp that’s 1/10 the size of a needle in a haystack of anemone.
My current setup involves the RX-100 Mark II (no reason to upgrade to the Mark III) on the Nauticam housing. But this time, I left my +10 diopter at shore because Tim Ho lent me his +15 prototype. Speaking of Tim, Anilao Photo Hotel is the place to be if you want to improve your photography (Not a sponsored post!! I pay for my dives!). This was the first time my spotter actually gave me an actual tutorial underwater, showing me how to stabilize my shots and adjusting my strobe positions. This was exactly what I was looking for in a guide and Tim’s dive masters are also trained photographers, so they know how to operate a camera as much as — and even more as — you do.
