Need advice on lenses, settings, strobe use for shark photos

Fellow divers, I need advice. I am packing for a trip to Coco's Island, Costa Rica. It is famous for shark sighting and I hope to take some shark shots myself. I will be shooting using full-frame sensor Canon 5D camera, i.e. no crop factor and also fewer options for zoom lenses. I have C16-35, C24-70 lenses and few fixed ones. S17-70 unfortunately is not an option for full-frame.

1. What lens would be most versatile for shark shooting? What lens have your liked most?
2. Does using strobes aggravate or distract sharks? Do they pay attention to strobe flash or completely ignore it?
3. Any particular advice on settings, etc.?

Your advice would be most sincerely appreciated.
Denis

Only been to Cocos once and durring the rainy season so viz averaged around 30ft. I am a Nikon guy and know nothing about Canon. The Hammer Heads are pretty shy. The key is to get as far from your dive buddies as possible, find a spot were there seem to be a lot of cleaners, then find a boulder you can hide behind and wait. They seem more spooked by movement than anything else. Strobes don't seem to bother them.

Lenses is tough. I mainly shot my 17-55mm. Once you feel you have some good solo shark shots and if viz permits you can shift to somthing wider. Practice your Natural Light shooting as schooling shots will all be Natural Light. Due to viz there were times I wish I had Manual Focus but there are ways to overcome that. We did two dives at the Silver Tip/Red Lip Batfish spot and I did take the 60mm out on the second dive.

Nikons you can set the ISO to a range, I shot 100-400 and when processing the photos many were in the 300-400 range. Focus lights don't do much good in this area.

Hopefully you will have great viz but if you prepare for low viz shooting you will cover your bases. There is a full trip report, gallery, slideshow at our site. The slide show gives you a decent video idea of what to expect on the White Tip night dive, its a blast!

Mjh,

Thank you very much for the tips. Very insightful. I would not have had an opportunity to prepare better without your advice. Hope everything works out well. I am off to the airport in a couple of minutes. I will post the pictures if I get anything worth posting when I come back.

Again, thank you very much!!

P.S. if I get a chance, I will try to check the forum from Costa Rica, if Internet happens to be available. All inputs are greatly appreciated.

the canon 24-70 2.8L is a great lens but it is not a good Underwater lens. i would recommend the 16-35 lens, it is one of my primary underwater lens along with the canon 60 mm macro. i would recommend using a faster shutter speed, at least 1/200 sec to help stop motion. One other thing to consider is setting your iso to 200-400 if you don't have powerful strobes it will shorten recycle time on your strobes.

i find that with my strobes i end up at about 100 to 200 iso and f 2.8 to 8.0 when shooting wide angle at this setting i tend to get nice dark blue backgrounds . if you want a brighter blue water set you iso to 300-400 and you should get nice light blue backgrounds. the one advantage to shooting at iso 300-400 is that the strobes don't take as long to charge and it makes it possible to get multiple shot off before the strobes wont fire. these are just a few thing that you might play with.

As said above the most sharks don't tend to pay attention to the strobes.

Thank you for advice. "the one advantage to shooting at iso 300-400 is that the strobes don't take as long to charge " - are you referring to setting iso on the flash manually or you are using TTL circuitry?

I'm a Nikon dude, shoot a D200, have never done CoCo's, and the only sharks I've seen when I had a camera in tow are Nurse sharks. That said, you want Wide. I've shot a few with my 18~35mm zoom, so that is a 27~52.5mm EQ on your Canon. That works well but I like even wider.

I prefer my 12~24mm (18mm~36mm EQ), so if the vis is good go with the wider lens.

For settings, I'd say a 1/200 or faster (likely limited by a 1/250 sync speed), and F5.6 or slower assuming you can get that light. I like fill flashing for wide angle shots, but you can also stop down, and darken the water.

I've read cases where Sharks are aggravated by the strobe not firing, but recycling. Or maybe the are just curious and playful, and the strobe recycle noise attracts them. There was a photo circulating a while back of a shark with a DSLR kit in it's mouth swimming off, double flash units and all. The DSLR was retrieved with little or no damage (so the shark was using kid gloves). But a lesson learned maybe to NOT clip off to the camera as if you were tied to it, and a Shark grabbed your kit, bad things may happen.

Manta Buddy:

Fellow divers, I need advice. I am packing for a trip to Coco's Island, Costa Rica. It is famous for shark sighting and I hope to take some shark shots myself. I will be shooting using full-frame sensor Canon 5D camera, i.e. no crop factor and also fewer options for zoom lenses. I have C16-35, C24-70 lenses and few fixed ones. S17-70 unfortunately is not an option for full-frame.

1. What lens would be most versatile for shark shooting? What lens have your liked most?
2. Does using strobes aggravate or distract sharks? Do they pay attention to strobe flash or completely ignore it?3. Any particular advice on settings, etc.?

Your advice would be most sincerely appreciated.
Denis

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Your bubbles will be the principle obstacle to getting close to the hammerheads in Cocos--practice holding your breath. They are, as far as I could tell, oblivious to strobes.

mjh:

Only been to Cocos once and durring the rainy season so viz averaged around 30ft. I am a Nikon guy and know nothing about Canon. The Hammer Heads are pretty shy. The key is to get as far from your dive buddies as possible, find a spot were there seem to be a lot of cleaners, then find a boulder you can hide behind and wait. They seem more spooked by movement than anything else. Strobes don't seem to bother them.

Lenses is tough. I mainly shot my 17-55mm. Once you feel you have some good solo shark shots and if viz permits you can shift to somthing wider. Practice your Natural Light shooting as schooling shots will all be Natural Light. Due to viz there were times I wish I had Manual Focus but there are ways to overcome that. We did two dives at the Silver Tip/Red Lip Batfish spot and I did take the 60mm out on the second dive.

Nikons you can set the ISO to a range, I shot 100-400 and when processing the photos many were in the 300-400 range. Focus lights don't do much good in this area.

Hopefully you will have great viz but if you prepare for low viz shooting you will cover your bases. There is a full trip report, gallery, slideshow at our site. The slide show gives you a decent video idea of what to expect on the White Tip night dive, its a blast!

Click to expand...

This is all good advice. Also, I used a 10.5 mm lens (with my Nikon D70--cropped sensor) on the night dive at Coral Gardens and got pretty good shots of the whitetip horde.

Like Ron, I shoot Nikon with a D200. Whenever I've shot sharks, I've used my 12-24mm wide zoom. I like to have the flexibility to zoom in a little if I can't get as close as I want to the sharks, although you have to remember that you still need to be reasonably close in order for any strobe lighting to be effective. These shots were taken with the 12-24 @ 24mm, 1/200 to 1/250 sec (max sync speed), f/6.3, ISO 200.

Ron, Vladimir, Mjh, Warren, thank you for words of wisdom. It really helps hearing from the people who have shot sharks before. I will definitely try 16-35mm (10-24mm equivalent for cropped sensor), although I tried it with with manta rays before in Thailand and they did not let us very close for this type close-ups. Unlike in Puerto Vallarta, where one let me ride on its back and play with it for about 10 mins, but I did not have a camera with me that time.

Warren, on the two photos you published, did you use fill flash? If you did, it blended in very well, so I can´t tell.