Wetpixel

Live Reports: Wetpixel/Mustard Macro Workshop 2018

Day 2

Day 2 of the Wetpixel/Alex Mustard Lembeh Macro Workshop dawned fine and bright. Once again an early breakfast was followed by Alex presenting his talk on Macro Backgrounds. The key here is that no matter how interesting, charismatic or eye-catching a macro subject is, unless the photographer places within an interesting environment, the image will have limited appeal.

Given that it is unethical to physically move subjects, the photographer needs to resort to technical options to achieve separation of the subject from a distracting background. These include limited depth of field, limiting light fall off, black backgrounds (using aperture), snooting and other techniques. Each of these has a place and the goal for today was to get the participants to start to use them appropriately.

After Alex’s talk, we went diving….

The critters were on form!

Two-morning dives were followed by lunch and lens, card and battery changes…

One of the things that we like to do during our workshops is to try out new gear…Alex put the RGBlue System O3 Twin light Premium Color continuous lighting system through its paces today:

An afternoon dive gave lots more fantastic subject to practice subject isolation techniques with.

This was followed by another night dive on a site called Pintu Colada, about 2 minutes boat ride from Lembeh Resort. It is a mixed site, with reef shallow, rubble around 15 meters and then sand deeper than this. This allows for a wide variety of subjects,

A quick shower, dinner and then an image review. The images submitted by the participants were amazing!

Folks were pretty tired!

  1. Day 1.
  2. Day 2.
  3. Day 3.
  4. Days 4, 5, 6.
  5. Day 7.
  6. Workshop 2-Day 1.
  7. Workshop 2-Day 2.
  8. Workshop 2-Day 3 and 4.