Great pictures - how much post processing did you have to do on these? The colors look awesome!
Anywhere from very little to quite a bit. The shots without the flash take some work.
I am trying to make them as color accurate as I can on the corals... using what they look like when using a flash up close.
The DC1000 has a "ocean" mode which is what most of the reef pictures are... they come out flat butt the colors are there. I am increasing the contrast some and the saturation some.
The biggest problem I run into is that the camera cranks up the ISO, which causes a LOT of noise in the water, so I am running all the blue water through Nik Software's Dfine anti-noise filter.
All of the coral there is hard coral, and it tends to run in colors... groups of yellows will be next to groups of greens. In most of the sites (but not all) the liverock tends to be that redish color. When I get a chance, I took a picture close up of the live rock that I will post... it isn't an interesting picture, other than it shows what the rock looks like.
Lots of shades of yellow and green, with the occasional purples thrown in.
Visibility is 150+ so that helps. I know it is 150+ because there are mooring buoys 150 feet apart. The buoys balls are about 15 feet down and you can see the other balls clearly when you are hanging next to your ball on a safety stop.
What is fun is to hover about 10 to the side of the ball and watch all the poor vacation divers hang on to the bucking mooring line for dear life... although sometimes I am afraid they are going to get shoulders separated.
I will post a before and after in this thread to give you an idea of what I am doing.