We were almost not going to go out this day. The wind was blowing onshore from the North East, which on the East Coast of NSW, is perfect for blue bottles. Good thing we did, as these fun tubes were throwing over on the sand bank.
1/2000sec | f/8 | ISO 400
I wanted to include a before and after example of this shot to show the difference editing can make.
As I always shoot RAW, the images come out very neutral, and somewhat flat and desaturated. As long as you have some form of RAW editing software such as Lightroom, Adobe Camera RAW, Capture One, etc, shooting RAW is the best option. You have much more room to move in post processing as opposed to shooting in JPEG.
I do 95% of my editing in Lightroom 4. In the before photo below you can see that it came out a bit under exposed for my liking, the shutter speed was a touch too fast, so I bumped up the exposure. The colours needed a bit of extra pop, so I increased the Vibrance of all the colours a few notches, and increased the Saturation and Luminance of the Aquas and Blues also. The image was still a bit too flat, so turning up the Contrast helped to boost the darks and lights and make the shot jump out a lot more.
