Ok - so admittedly, I had two years of rust on my underwater photography skills when I went on this trip, and it definitely showed. I've had to do some work to salvage pretty much every photo I've kept so far, and each one has needed a pretty heavy dose of cleanup. Then I came to today's photo...

I was about to delete this one; at first glance, it is a complete loss and on any other day, I very well may have just hit the delete key and not thought twice about it. But for whatever reason, something caught my eye, and I wondered if I could recover enough from the file to make a worthwhile image. I ran it through a number of adjustments within Adobe Camera Raw, and then finally processed it into a sepia tone using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.

I found the end result pretty pleasing to be honest...

1. Straight out of the camera		3. Attempted color correction in ACR
2. Initial corrections in ACR		4. Final result after Silver Efex

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM AF at 14mm, 1/250 sec at f/5.6. ISO 400. Ikelite Housing and Port with dual Ikelite DS 161 Strobes in eTTL mode. Raw conversion Adobe Camera Raw, additional processing in Adobe Photoshop CS5 with Nik Silver Efex Pro 2

What do you think? I think it has the feeling of a pirate's treasure map or such... it just seems fitting and really is a vast improvement from the original. Plus I must have a thing for photos of nurse sharks processed in sepia tone...

Thanks for stopping by!

- Bill