Dahab is a lovely place, with friendly dive centres and great sites. It's crowded, admittedly, but not so much that it ruins your experience. We did 6 dives over three days this break. The last day we couldn't dive as we were flying back and you have to leave 18-24 hours between diving and flying otherwise you risk getting the bends...nice.
Our first morning, though, saw us snorkelling on the reef just by the hotel we were staying in. We took the camera out to get used to using it, and to try out some of the settings. The camera features an "underwater" mode, which changes your ISO speed and white balance, and is good enough for snorkelling in shallow water. Most of the colours come out well down to about 3 metres, but the red soon disappears after that and you get a blue wash. Only under certain situations were the images over exposed.
However, getting back to dry land we were able to use some of the tools in Photoshop to fix the colour balance and contrast. Just auto levelling the photos brought out some amazing results, particularly on photos with a lot of depth. Close-up photos weren't affected as much, but it still sharpened the image.
Examples of the snorkelling photos (before and after Photoshop) are below. Click the photos to see full-screen versions.
Scotty freediving down to the reef
Sohal surgeonfish
Small coral head
The problem with diving, therefore, is that the deeper you go the more the water filters out the colours from the light spectrum. The underwater setting on the camera is all very well and good, but it's only really good for those few metres at the top when you're snorkelling. Anything past 4-5 metres and you need to start altering the white balance. Fortunately our camera can "auto evaluate" the white balance - this is where you show the camera something that you know is white (usually a piece of white plastic, but often the sandy bottom works just as well), and the camera changes its colour balance to suit. In the case of diving, this means adding more of the red spectrum to the images to offset the red that you lose at depth.
Without setting the white balance, pictures turn out incredibly blue. It's possible to tweak the colours in Photoshop, but too much and they just look wrong! Just before they start to look strange, they still turn out like the ones below taken at the Lighthouse reef. We just used the "underwater" setting on the camera on these shots, but it didn't add enough red to offset that which is lost by the depth. They're nice photos, but very...blue!
Ascending with the reef wall to our right at about 15m
Our dive guide playing with some clownfish in their anemone at about 10m
Dive guide making air rings during the safety stop at 5m
On all our subsequent dives we therefore played about with some of the camera settings to work out what we liked best. Some people like the blue tint to their photos as it "proves you're underwater" whereas others prefer to offset the lost red to try to capture more natural colours. However, doing the latter sometimes makes your photos lose the underwater feel as whites are white and there's so little blue. Soe of these photos don't get across the depth they've been taken at - they seem like they're only a metre down, when really they could been 18m!
Flash, too, is a problem when setting the white balance. If you've set the white balance to take accoutn of all the blue, white light will appear red - so using a flash makes your images come out red. A good example of this is the picture of Alice below, taken at 32m at the bottom of the Canyon where she has a devilish tint!
Alice showing her guage: 32m at the bottom of the Canyon, and plenty of air for a nice safe ascent and swimming safety stop
Anyway, you're not interested in all the boring geek talk. You just want pictures, right? Well, here's the best:
Scotty, just as he's breathing out!
Alice hovering in the bubble curtain above the Canyon
Looking up at the opening to the Canyon (18m) from the floor (32m)
Coral arch surrounded by sea goldies (aka lyretail anthias)
Close-up of a clam
Cornet fish surrounded by sea goldies. You can see a couple of clown fish swimming alongside.
Just a really lovely photo of a coral head
Pufferfish. Clearly quite happy with us swimming about, as he didn't blow up!
The penultimate photo of the whole dive trip, and probably the best of the lot: a lionfish hovering over a small coral head
Our dive guide for this trip, Karl, taking a photo of the lionfish
Karl kindly returned the favour and got a shot of Scotty snapping away at the lionfish while Alice hovered above
