STEP 6 JUST HOW CLOSE IS THE CLOSE IN CLOSE-FOCUS?

For that red soft coral, the answer is - very! There is an old maxim that I think I first read in Jim and Cathy Church's The Nikonos Handbook that runs along the lines of 'Take the shot; move in closer and take it again; get too close and repeat; and finally, get much too close, to the point that you think the shot will look impossible. It will be that last picture that has all the impact.' The coral was about 4in from the dome port when I took the image on the left.

Compare the same picture to the photograph on the right, which was taken from about two feet away. Not only has the coral lost impact, but it has shrunk in size and is no longer a main component of the the shot. Worse still, the background intrudes more and contributes to a more cluttered overall image. Here again, by getting in close you can manipulate one of the components of the image by making it seem bigger and more imposing than it really is. This leads us quite nicely to the last phase in the building of this picture.

STEP 7 COMPOSITION

The notion of composition used to induce a mild groan from me until I realised that by using one or two simple ideas, the whole process can be rendered great fun rather than a trial. These are the 'rule of thirds', and 'diagonals', and if you can apply them to wide-angle close-focus photography, the results can be outstanding.

Look again at the final picture. If you divide it with imaginary lines into thirds, top to bottom and side to side, you will get a grid with four intersection points.

Now the trick is to try to place the major components on these intersection points; and preferably diagonally to each other, as is roughly the case here on the right.

I attempt to overlay this grid in my mind's eye when I am composing through the viewfinder, and to try to position the camera so that the image conforms to these guiding principles. Those times that it works out, the shot will be very strong compositionally and will have greatly increased impact. When it doesn't, as in the picture above,where the sun and soft coral have deserted the diagonal and are lined up one on top of the other, the image is not so pleasing. For those using Nik Vs, the composition thing is rather more complicated because of the dreaded parallax caused by the fact that what you see through the viewfinder is not the same as what the lens sees.