Filter, Lights, or Both?

[fishstix]

I have assembled an underwater video camera with lights and will be taking a dive soon to shoot my first real underwater footage. What I'm not clear about is whether I still need a color correction filter on the camera even though I am using lights. Obviously the video lights will have a limited range, but if I use lights AND a filter in combination, will the filter color correct for the blue/green tint of the water outside the range of the lights but add an unwanted red/magenta tint to the portion of the shot that is within range of the lights?

How do you experienced underwater videographers use your lights and filters? In combination or either one or the other?

 

[KeithG]

Answer to your first question is YES. Generally lights means no filter. But what color are your lights and what color is your filter?

The standard "caribbean blue water" red filter prevents blues and greens from passing and hence makes things look more normal when you get down far enough to lose the red (there is also a green water red filter...) Using a light and filter at depth will make things close look red and things far away look rightish.

For my Caribbean diving I used the guidelines of all natural above 20 feet. Red filter below 20 feet. No filter, regardless of depth when using lights. This is based upon an amphibico light setup.

 

[fishstix]

Giffenk- Thanks for replying. I'm using two 800 lumen LED lights from light-for-me, part of a GoPro camera kit from tec dive gear. The documentation that comes with these lights is pretty lame, not much useful information and some of it is down-right inaccurate. (They don't even tell you what model light it is.) But the light source looks like it's about 5600 K or daylight color temp. My first dive will be in a freshwater quarry so I was thinking about a magenta filter, for tropical blue water dives I was going to use a red/orange filter. But it sounds like filters would only complicate things if I'm using lights. What lumen rating & color temp are the amphibico lights you reference?

 

[KeithG]

The light is no longer in production, but is a model VLAL0010 10 watt HID. I found a page that reported its color as 7000K and another that reported it being between 6000k and 7500K
http://www.sensaciones.org/down/uwp/UwP4.pdf

No idea on the lumens...

 

[fishstix]

Thanks for the link. Cool magazine!