Really excellent shots! How much processing did you do on the images? They look like saturation and contrast have been bumped, but could just be really colorful fish in very clear water.
I used to be a total purist and never did any digital adjustments to my photos. Now I've decided that I'm fine with anything that makes the image appear more as it did to my eye at the time I took it -- but enhancing it beyond that still feels like "cheating".
Thanks Jase. I have to process every photo I take since I shoot in raw mode... To get good underwater photographs you have to start with clear water – there’s no way to process around that. Proper camera white balance is very important for getting good colors, and underwater photos generally do require a higher contrast setting than land photos.
In my opinion the whole “digital image editing is cheating” type of argument is unfounded. I won’t get into all of it here, but no photograph is completely objective. All photographs are imperfect representations of reality. My goal is to produce an image that best represents what I saw and best communicates my intended message. I will certainly use any tool (including photo processing software) that allows me to do that better.