Day Dreaming

I'm the one day dreaming, not the turtle. Well, maybe the turtle is, I'm not sure.

I've been day dreaming about those tropical islands lately so I thought I would reach into some of my older photos from a wonderful trip to Maui a few years ago. The wife and I are planning a trip back very soon, maybe I will run into this guy (or gal) again!

Parker asked if the turtle is as big as he looks, here is a photo of me swimming with one. It's not the same turtle but the same size. To give you some reference since most of you have never met me, I stand 6' 2" tall and I was about five feet behind the turtle. In other words, the turtle is about three feet long.

And yes, shooting underwater has a whole series of challenges that you don't find on dry land. The three most annoying is that available light drops off drastically in just a few feet of water, colors come out different if you don't have your camera set right and you can get "back-scatter" if your lighting and angles aren't right. Back-scatter is when the light, either natural but mostly from a flash, picks up all of the little particles floating in the water. This leaves a lot of garbage in the shot. Shooting in RAW format helps with the lighting and the colors because you can do a lot in a photo program to correct the things you screwed up while trying to take a photo AND breath.