Bruce is a NAUI dive instructor and an avid underwater photographer who began diving 10 years ago. He has been fortunate enough to travel throughout most of the Caribbean where he has photographed sea creatures ranging from nudibranchs to whale sharks. He hopes to begin doing more diving in Southeast Asia in the coming years. Bruce's photos have graced the covers of several magazines and can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/bcampbell65/ or bcampbell65 on the photo stock agency shutterstock and on adobe stock.
I started doing blue water dives in the Caribbean almost 20 years ago. Clear water, a pretty good abundance of fish life and a number of species of shrimp, crabs and mollusks. Of the mollusks, sea slugs and other critters that had caught my eye, mostly did so because of their brilliant colors. Early on I did not spend much time searching for colorful critters. At least according to the critter books I have, it looked to me like there might be slightly more than a dozen nudibranch species in the Caribbean.
Lettuce sea slug in the Caribbean
Overtime, it appeared to me that I needed to expand my horizons and see some of the sea life in the Pacific. After several trips to various parts of the Pacific, I stumbled on to muck diving in the Philippines.
Now mind you historically, my underwater shooting has been probably 90%/10% wide angle to macro images. So on my first trip to do muck diving, I was trying to get my mind around a very different kind of shooting plus get a sense of what the creatures might look like and how to capture them. When I got to the Philippines one of the comparasions that struck me was that unlike the Caribbean that has slightly more than a dozen different types of nudibranch for example, there were over a thousand different varieties of nudibranch.
I learned a lot on the first trip, not the least of which was to see the benefit of controlling the light through the use of a snoot. The snoot I took on the first trip to the Philippines I had picked up a few weeks before I left. Yes, it constricted the light from the strobe that I attached it to. But, aiming the snooted light was a real problem. The set up lacked an aiming light. Frankly, the snoot looked more like a funnel that you might find in your kitchen than a light shaping device. So it was largely hit or miss unless the guide I was with helped me aim the snoot. When shooting the light worked, it was really helpful at lighting the subject and not lighting a lot of the background.
Then I tried a snoot that had a focus light in it. For someone like me with relatively short arms, its still a challenge to get the snoot aimed well and then take pictures. Nevertheless having an aiming light did make it much easier to focus on everything else about capturing the image and worry less about getting the snoot aimed right.
Armina grazin on the sub-straight Porcelain crab on sea pen: who knew they have blue eyes? Snooted frog fish yawning Snooted goby Green Jell-O shot?
So I guess you could say I’m hooked on controlling the light with a snoot.
During a few months a year, primarily from December to March, it is possible to see great hammerhead sharks in Bimini. Sure I had taken pictures of sharks underwater before, but never hammerhead sharks.
In my preparation for the trip, it looked to me like the likelyhood of getting a picture of a great hammerhead without going on a dive where the sharks were being fed, was a very low probability. You have to ask: “What self respecting apex predator would want to be around a bunch of noisy open circuit divers?” The answer it seemed to me was a very old decrepit deaf hammerhead and then that would probably be a fluke. So that meant in all probability I would have to be on a dive where the shop feed the hammerheads in order to get them to come in close enough to photograph. That determination, limited the shops that I could dive with to one in Bimini. As sometimes happens, one of my friends Michelle, with DXDivers was running a trip out to Bimini to dive at the Big Game Club with Neal Watson’s shop. So I signed up for the trip and talked David, one of my dive buddies into joining me.
So, before my trip I started by looking at images that had been taken in Bimini. What I noticed was that where available the camera settings reflected the images had been shot on 16mm fish eye lenses. Having shot a 16mm lens for several years it occurred to me that it is a great lens if you can get close to the subject, but not so great if you could not get reasonably close. It also occurred to me that it was probably a bad idea to swim towards a shark that was feeding.
A few years ago I had added to my lens collection a 16-35 f4 zoom lens. The optical characterisitics of the lens I think are quite impressive because it renders a good rectilinear image as long as there is a good amount of light. I had shot the lens behind a 9 inch Zen dome and the optical characteristics were quite good. Given that I thought there was a pretty good chance that the sharks might be a ways away from me when peak action occurred, I opted to bring along the 16-35mm lens and the Zen dome. Now the down side of the Zen dome is that it’s enormous, and weighs several pounds. It also requires a substantial extension tube. My camera rig without the Zen dome weighs in at about 35 pounds. The Zen dome with extension tube adds another 3 pounds or so but also changes substantially the buoyancy characteristics of my rig. And it takes up about almost a third of my dive bag. So now I had to think about what portion of my usual gear was I going to leave home?
In general the images that my review founds that I liked had been shot on full fame DSLR cameras. The ISO’s had been set at between 100 and 400. The fstops used had been between f7 and f14. I also noted that the shutter speed tended to be in the range of 1/200th to 1/250th of a second. The vast majority of the images appeared to have been shot with flash, although for most of the images I could not determine what flash unit or units had been used.
What I could not tell from the images that I reviewed was the relative depth that the shots were taken, but I could see that most were taken where the sharks were swimming over the white sand that is common in the Bahamas. My guess was that the water depth was about 30 feet. As it turned out my guess was pretty close, 26 feet on one dive and 24 on the other.
I next considered strategies for getting sharp focus of the hammerheads as they came in to feed. What I have noticed from other efforts at “shooting sharks” was that they are fast for underwater animals, and their movements seemed to me to be somewhat unpredictable. So It seemed to me that what I wanted to do was be able to use was three D tracking and to try to get focus on the eye as best I could. With some sharks I had noticed it was hard just keeping them in the frame if they were moving quickly. As one of my friends video demonstrates hammerheads are very fast in the water. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CZ5mYuFAt5y/?utm_medium=copy_link
It also occurred to me that continuous focus mode might help, but the limiting factor was that underwater strobes only recycle so fast. To try to help save the strobes, I used a relatively low manual strobe power so that if I shot more than one image at a time there was at least some hope that the strobe would fire a second and maybe a third time before recycling.
I also decided I would take a somewhat different approach to shooting the sharks. In most of the images I saw the angle of the shot placed the shark alone over the sand, with few if any divers in any shot. It seemed to me that the reality was that because the sharks were coming in to be fed there were divers who should be included in the shot along with the feeder.
Coming at you
It wasn’t until I was mid-way through the first dive that it occurred to me that the story really was the interaction between the feeders and the sharks. No it is not ballet, nor is it a bull fight because hopefully everyone goes home with the same number of bits that they came to the feed with. Instead, it is a delicate effort to respect the sharks while at the same time demonstrate the pure power and strength that the Hammerheads have that have allowed them to survive millions of years as apex predators.
Surely you are not going to miss that fish treat?
Walking the shark after lunch Open wide You had your treat now carry on
So were the actual dives somewhat like what I expected? I would say so, but like vacations, you still have to go and see for yourself in order to enjoy them.
Sometimes when we are diving we find things that catch our eyes but yet, the conditions are less than ideal. Other times we go on a trip where we expect to see one or more particular animals, yet they just don’t show up. Is the thrill of getting to see one or more rare or unusual animals what keeps us diving? Maybe, but there is probably more to it than that.
About seven years ago I had a trip planned that would allow me to go to a location that has a high probability of seeing manatees. With my usual luck it snowed so hard that the flights would not go from Dallas to Florida so that trip like many of late, wound up on the scrape heap.
This year we traveled to Placentia Belize and while it is unusual to see manatees in Belize it is at least possible. We had been sailing for a week and had not seen any manatees. Now we had seen quite a bit of wildlife, but we had not found a single manatee even though we had been in some relatively good environmental conditions to spot them. We saw dolphins. We saw turtles.
And sometimes we could get pretty close to the animals.
We saw sharks.
We saw quite good variety of tropical fish and other marine life.
But no manatees. I had all but given up hope of spotting any. We got to the last day of sailing and cruised into a small island. The water visibility was pretty poor. I think I was the only one to get into the water to snorkel. We had long since burned up all of our air tanks so I was relegated to snorkeling. I took my underwater camera and left the strobes off because I figured they would just light up all the particulate in the water. I had been in the water over an hour and had seen a few interesting critters, but nothing particularly interesting. I think I had taken maybe 3 or 4 shots with the rest of time just looking for anything interesting. The reef went pretty much up to the shoreline and I had started from the boat and I swam more or less towards the island. There were a couple of small dogs on shore that would periodically bark at me. I guess they just wanted to let me know they were there. I had swum the length of the island (it was small) when the reef pretty much petered out and I found myself over mostly turtle grass. There wasn’t even any self respecting turtle grazing on the turtle grass. I was about to turn around and head to the boat when I saw movement in the water. It was maybe 25 meters away so I swam toward it. As I swam the water got murkier and murkier. And after a few seconds it occurred to me what I was looking at through the murk…
Yep, it was that long hoped for manatee. So I kicked hard to try to get closer. Unfortunately, he heard me. With a tail flip or two he was out of range.
Oh well, I guess I will have to find another one….
Those dark spots are the reef reaching up to grab the boat
Belize is about the size of Massachusetts, so we are not talking about a large land mass, at least for someone from Texas. Belize is lucky because off it’s coast is the second largest reef system in the world. The Meso American reef stretches the entire length of the coast of Belize and carries over to the Riviera Maya in Mexico to the north, and down to Honduras to the south.
There are quite a few islands off the coast of the mainland. Perhaps the most famous islands include San Pedro, and Caye Cauker. What becomes obvious if you fly into Placencia, is that there are quite a few islands not far from the mainland. Many of the islands and islets have interesting names such as Ray Caye, South Caye, Silk Caye ect. Some are have houses or other buildings on them. Some are not much more than a palm tree or two and maybe a mangrove tree or two. But sandwiched among a number of the islands is an area that from a sailing perspective is a fairly difficult area to navigate. In the “bad lands” the water tends to be shallow, and the reef is not particularly well charted.
Ten years ago when we first sailed into the bad lands with a very capable South African captain, he told me that he really watched his gps chart constantly because he did not want to run aground. He explained and it became pretty obvious fairly quickly that the reef was very shallow and rose and fell without a lot of warning. Our captain 10 years ago followed exactly the same track on each trip, just so he would not run aground. Ten years later we sailed with a Belizean captain. Captain David knew the bad lands like the back of his hand, but still he was careful to watch the shadows in the water to make sure the reef did not reach up and grab our boat.
But because the bad lands are pretty shallow they make an excellent place to go snorkeling.
Are the bad lands deep enough to dive, perhaps, but they are probably better just to snorkel and save our gas for a part of the reef that is not so shallow.
You are here for a cleaning I presume? Asked the blue head wrasse to the nurse shark
Not long ago I visited Silke Caye which is south of Placencia in Belize. I had been to Silke Caye about a decade ago and when I dove there then the wind was howling and the water was pretty stirred up so underwater photography was a real challenge. This time Hurricane “Grace” had gone by to the north, but had still managed to stir up the water. Nevertheless, we still went diving. We had a warm day, but the trip out was basically windless and the water was glassy calm. We got out to Silke Caye and received the obligatory briefing from the park ranger about where you can go and where you can’t go within the park. After the briefing the snorkelers stayed on the island of silk caye to snorkel. Calling it an island is probably an exaggeration because it is so small it only has three palm trees and a single camp style toilet.
Meanwhile the divers got back in the boat and we motored out from the island maybe another couple hundred yards to a wall where we did our first dive. We back-rolled off the boat and started down. If you have been to Belize you are probably aware that the segment of the Meso American reef which runs by Belize tends to have a lot of soft corals which include sea fans and and sea whips. Yes, there are hard corals, but oftentimes they are surrounded by the soft corals.
Soft corals are abundant on the Belizean portion of the Meso American Reef
One thing I noticed after a while was that there seemed to be a substantial decrease in the numbers of native fish stock on the dive. There were squirrel fish who were pretty well ensconced in the holes in the reef. But, what I did not see were the large numbers of grunts, snappers and other smaller reef fish such as blue chromis. We did find several lion fish which we speared . We also saw several nurse sharks one of who followed out group for much of the dive.
Squirrel fish swimming over the reef
When we first came across the nurse shark, I thought well if we get one pass we will be pretty lucky. Well fortunately I was wrong. We would swim a ways and he would circle back to check us out. He tended to swim right through the group of divers. So I began dropping down to the level of the soft corals and positioned myself so he would swim right to me. In all he made maybe a dozen passes during the dive. Sometimes he would turn just as he got to my camera. A couple of times he swam under me.
A nurse shark cruising over the soft corals Now you are getting up close and personal And yet another close pass
So at least on the first couple of dives we saw a lot of nurse sharks and soft corals but not as many native species of fish.
