419 Dive Log Australasia AUGUST 2026

Photo comments: Shark mating season is in winter. Wobbegongs and Port Kackson sharks congregate in numbers. The best lens to capture this resting scene is the wonderful 16,, Fish Eye Lens hehind a dome port. You have to get in evry close, much less tahn 1/2 a metre. Strobes must be raised high and well back behind the dome port to avoid back lighting problems. I used my 5000 lumen Orca Torch to light up the foreground and to help the computer inside the camera to focus. It was very dark inside that overhang cave. I opened up the ISO to 800 and used 1/80 sec shutter speed. The Aperture is f16 to help shark focus. These photos must be shot in RAW so you can beef up the background light in the after processing cheat session.

It’s a percentage game. You have to take a lot of shots to get that one in a hundred good one. Photography has a habit of humbling you. It happens all of the time. When you see a winner, you do not see the many fails. Then again, winning photographers have a better hit rate. Their eye is trained and they have built up habits that increase their chance of nailing that shot. Things like the choice of lens, finding the optimum angle, making the most of the camera settings, the framing of the photo and the composition as well as the best use of basic principles such as the Rule of Thirds and the use of Leading lines. This comes with experience. In theory, each year, you should get better and better. If you don’t get better and you are satisfied with rubbish shots and you do not care, then that is your choice.

When you need to decide to improve, there is a challenge waiting and the joy and satisfaction of getting some mastery. It is a little bit like karate. A fifth Dan black Belt karate master will definitely have been beaten up far more than a yellow belt during his life. The difference being that he has learned to prevent it from happening again better than his lower ranked combatants. I used this concept when I was teaching Open Water Divers how to dive with a buddy. On the first dive, I had all of the divers holding hands. It worked a treat, especially with eight students. It was my way to keep them together and to stop those pesky over-confident ‘wandering’, thoughtless divers that appeared who would try to swim ahead and disappear on their own.

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DIVE LOG Australasia #419 - August ‘26

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