Adrian Binney, PPSA, LRPS
About the Image(s)
Taken when near 1/2 way across the Atlantic in mid January while crossing from UK towards the Caribbean on a long 65 day cruise which included a week within the Amazon (getting c900 miles up to Manaus). More of that for another month.
Flying fish is always fun but challenging to capture. Rule of thumb is that if a swarm fly (glide actually) away from the front of the ship, they are young and thus v small. One wants the bigger more individual ones which also can glide further. The longer one sets one’s zoom lens, the narrower the view obviously but as a micro4/3 user, cropping deeply into an image which full-frame photographers on board can do doesn’t work for me - so both patience and hoped-for better technique gives me a chance - about 30% success in at least getting the fish in the frame!
So I decided to have my zoom set at near 300mm (max = 1,000mm with internal 1.25 converter set which I had here and this allows a very highly geared zoom movement). Settings here were 613mm, 1/1,600 at f5 ISO 200 after exp comp at -0.7.
This gave quite a dark image with the fish small, so in PP I first push the Raw file through Topaz Photo Ai to remove any noise, crop roughly then duplicate the pixels x2.
With a Tiff returned to Lightroom, I first developed it to the 2nd extra image here, to show the trail in the water - but then cropped further to result in the final image here, as it seemed sharp enough to give the fish more space in the frame.