can you take pictures under the blue lights?

[Rogger Castells]

I have a Nikon D90, can someone tell me how to shoot under actinic lighting, what's the secret? do i need to correct the white balance, if so, how do i do it? do i need to use the flash? do i need to have an uv filter on the lens?
I am lost, my pictures just come up over saturated.
Any tips will be appreciated

 

[Brett9917]

It is very much your white balance. If you the software such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture or iPhoto; you can adjust it in those programs if you shoot in RAW mode. Otherwise you can try and adjust manually on you camera.

 

[Reef Bass]

Shoot in RAW. Adjust color temperature (move slider til colors are right) while post processing. Very simple and accurate.

 

[Rogger Castells]

Ok, Thanks for the tip, I tried last night, I shot in raw and also Manual mode, I did not have time to post pictures but they came out much better, TY

 

[twiggyb]

If you want some glowing pics of some of the corals you can find a yellow filter and put it in front of the lens to capture some of the florescence of certain corals.

 

[Rogger Castells]

Here are the pictures, these are just raw format, manual mode and taken on a tripod and timer. What is your opinion, how can I improve from here and also what is that I can adjust using iPhoto or photoshop I have both but know very little about photoshop, any input will be appreciated.

 

[nivram]

Rogger, set the white balance in the camera. Also, sometimes a little diffused flash doesn't hurt. This is whats worked for me.

 

[luisgo]

Looking at your photos I think there is no way you can take pictures without the blue. Your lights are very blue. The best way to deal with that is with a diffused flash to see the reds.

If you have supplemental blue light like leds you can turn them off to take the pictures. The anemone with red tips looks like it is under blue leds.

If your D90 is similar to my D60 go to the shooting meno and in white balance select "Auto" hit OK and you will see a color matrix, move the slider all the way to the right to increase the reds and decrease the blues. That way you can fix part of the white balance issue in the camera.

The matrix looks something like this

BTW I am using your food and I like it a lot.

 

[Rogger Castells]

Thank you luisgo, My camera does have the same settings but i had no idea what it was for....

 

[KindOfSalty]

I am fairly new to the hobby. I was wondering what that is in the center of the forth picture. That is really interesting. I like it.

 

[jimmy_beaner]

Why not just flip on a regular (white) light? I adjust "temp" of light in post processing, but your blues are washed out creating blue "hot spots" where they are so saturated with blue I doubt if you could recover any information from that area.

 

[Rogger Castells]

I am fairly new to the hobby. I was wondering what that is in the center of the forth picture. That is really interesting. I like it.

That is a rock anemone, really nice and very colorful.

 

[Rogger Castells]

Looking at your photos I think there is no way you can take pictures without the blue. Your lights are very blue. The best way to deal with that is with a diffused flash to see the reds.

If you have supplemental blue light like leds you can turn them off to take the pictures. The anemone with red tips looks like it is under blue leds.

If your D90 is similar to my D60 go to the shooting meno and in white balance select "Auto" hit OK and you will see a color matrix, move the slider all the way to the right to increase the reds and decrease the blues. That way you can fix part of the white balance issue in the camera.

The matrix looks something like this

BTW I am using your food and I like it a lot.

BTW, I will be in Puerto Rico this weekend and the First PR coral conference, hope to meet you there.