With this weeks image, I return to one of my favourite shoots for the year. A very early morning with 3 dive boats and 2 drones at my disposal, with the intention of creating a video that breaks away from the serious day to day work and show some fun during the gorgeous early golden hour.
This image shows the In Deep Dive Centre fleet Seeker, Panter & Eclipse just inside the western entrance to Plymouth Breakwater with the lighthouse in the foreground, all backlit by the sun. The image itself is a 5-shot HDR with the addition of some iris-blur. It was captured with our favourite camera/lens combo, Zunmuse x5s and DJI 15mm MFT lens mounted on the DJI Inspire 2. We find the micro four thirds sensor of the x5s offers great dynamic range and the 15mm lens is beautifully sharp & crisp and opening up to f1.7 is also very fast and great for low light. The lens also gives some great lens flare when pointing into sunlight – something I appreciate isn’t everyones cup of tea but we love it.
We recently completed a video for In Deep that was 14 months in the making. The plan was to incorporate aerial, surface and underwater footage of a Blue Shark snorkelling trips they offer. On a perfect day in 2019 we boarded Eclipse and headed out to sea. Leaving Plymouth Sound a friendly pod of common dolphin came to say hello, later on another pod was spotted. 25 miles out the engines were turned off and Damian “the shark wrangler” set to work chumming the water. Although there was interest from a couple of Blue sharks, they didn’t want to come and play – you cannot book nature after all! Fast forward to 2020 and the man shark season was upon us again. Instead of going very early season as previously, we decided to wait go a month later into the season, and the winds picked up preventing us from going out! We re-scheduled for the following week and were hit by another storm, we finally had an opportunity with marginal winds and we went for it. We were finally able to capture some underwater footage of these magnificent, beautiful, majestic fish. The on boat footage was shot with our DJI OSMO and the in-water footage with our Canon EOS 5d mk4 and Nauticam housing.