Category Archives: Macro
Have you been black water diving?
I had been diving for nearly 20 years before I ever came across black water diving. When I first heard that to do the dive we would be out in very deep water at night (perhaps over 1000 feet deep) with video lights on a string providing light to the creatures that might swim up for the depths, I had a few concerns. Sure I had done quite a few “shark” dives over the years, but I had always done those dives in the daylight so I could at least see them coming. I talked to the dive leader and heard that in all the black water dives they had done to that point they had not been visited by any sharks. Then I asked about what I might see in the night. I then heard about the great vertical migration. The short version is that billions of larval size creatures swim up from the depths each night to feed at the surface, only to return to the depths before daytime so they do not become some predator’s breakfast.
Like much in diving good buoyancy control was essential because unlike some places that do tethered black water dives we would be swimming fee without being tethered to the boat. Now controlling buoyancy plus controlling light for taking pictures sounded like quite a challenge. One of the tips I did hear and pay attention to was to listen to my ears. If I was having to clear that meant i was going deeper. So I thought that what I would do is have one eye on the string of lights and the pumpkin at the top, and have one eye focused on what was available to see.
My first black water dive, I swam around a ton and my focus light had a very wide beam. I thought I was swimming in a snow storm. The closest I got to getting a usable image was a picture of the ink from a squid that had jetted away from me.
Three years went by and I returned with the same camera rig except this time instead of a wide angle focus light I used one with a very narrow beam. Was it hard taking picture of the creatures I found on my second black water dive? In a word: yes. But I was more confident of what I would do and had a good bit more success in capturing some of the critters that had come up from the depths. Now buoyancy was still a big concern because even with having the string of lights as a reference point it would have been very easy to drop below the last light. What I can say is that black water diving is an advanced skill and if not tethered it is really a dive that should be saved until the diver has excellent buoyancy control skills.
Do you like to see small critters?
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.
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.
So I guess you could say I’m hooked on controlling the light with a snoot.
The Eye’s have it?
Sometimes you just have to be creative
In north Texas it is hard to get excited about getting all geared up with scuba gear and an underwater camera to take pictures underwater when the water is in the 50s and the visibility is in the teens. Sure you can swim around and find a fish or two, but it seems like an awful lot of work, particularly for someone like me who is basically lazy. So as I was wracking my brain for ideas for what to shoot at this time of year underwater I came up with the thought of why not create a wreck or two out of legos and see what it looks like underwater?
Well the first problem that had to be overcome was how do you get legos to sink? What occurred to me was maybe some water proof glue with some big washers or bolts glued to the bottom of a legos 10 X 10 sheet would work.
As I found out, four large washers will sink a standard 10 X 10 lego sheet. And, I figured out that with just a few attachment points the legos figures I was able to build would actually adhere to the 10 X 10 lego sheet.
The next challenge was how much do I want to spend on legos and mini-figures to create these submersible platforms. I found much to my amazement Legos really seem to hold their value. I was quite surprised that used mini-figures go for $5 bucks or more a piece at the local used lego store. I made a comment at the local used legos store about the mini figures holding their value, and the owner looked at me like: well duh! what planet did you come from.
I looked at eBay and found that here and there there were a few mini figures that would cost about $2 a figure, but that still seemed pretty pricey for something that might or might not work.
So it was back to the legos resell shop and buy an assortment of bricks and see if I could build a wreck or two out of the assortment of legos. It was a bit interesting to see what came in an assortment package. With some creativity I came up with a few ideas of how to put together a few figures that looked like they might be the remainder of a wreck.
I have a few more mini figures on order so we will see if they arrive in time to be added before the next class.
Do you have a favorite undersea animal?
Have you been to Anilao?
In search of small things
Much of my time spent doing underwater photography has been spent shooting through a wide angle lens, which allows me to capture some of the grandeur of what can be found underwater. Shipwrecks, large reef structures, sharks, and substantial schools of fish have been interesting to me. It has only been in the last few years that I have begun to start making images of smaller creatures found in the ocean.
The thing that strikes me about the creatures in the ocean is the extraordinary diversity among the animals.
For example, one of the animals that I have observed during my diving career is wire coral. Wire coral like other coral is composed of colonies of polyps which live in a colony to form the length of the coral. To me wire coral looks like a curly strand of coral, similar to a pigs tail, only much longer. Generally wire coral is only found on deeper dives. It was not until I stopped and looked at the length of several wire coral strands that I notice there were sometimes shrimp that were less than a couple centimeters in length living on the wire coral. I started looking at all of the wire corals I could find, and only in a small number of wire corals did I find any shrimp. Put it this way, I have never found a “herd” of wire coral shrimp on a single strand of wire coral.
Wire coral shrimp are tough little guys to take a picture of. Think of it this way, wire coral is often a centimeter or less in diameter. So getting the camera lens to focus on a spot that is that narrow is not easy, especially in current. Add to the complexity the fact that you have to put quite a bit of light on the shrimp just to try to acquire focus on them. And, of course, the shrimp don’t particularly like my focus light so they tend to move all over the wire coral, which makes taking a picture of them even more difficult. In the image above one of my dive buddies had to use the tip of a chop stick to block the shrimp from scurrying aware from my focus light.
When I have searched wire corals, which are often 6 to 10 feet in length, it is pretty uncommon to find even one shrimp on the entire length of the coral. On my last dive trip we did about twenty dives. I did not find more than a couple dozen wire corals. And, only on two wire corals did I find even one shrimp. And people say that hitting a major league fast ball is hard. At least the batters know where the plate is and the plate is more than a hundred times larger. What if baseball allowed the opposite team to move home plate around the ball park randomly? That is what trying to shoot wire coral shrimp is like. I keep telling my self patience is a virtue…
On the other hand, sometimes sea critters act as if they are just walking out on stage waiting for some one to take a picture of them.
This white spotted shrimp was for much of the time I observed him hiding in the arms of the giant sea anemone which he claimed as his home. But, much to my surprise he eventually jumped from the anemone to the red sponge which made it possible for me to acquire focus for the picture. Sometimes patience is a virtue….
Do you have a favorite crustacean?
According to my critters book the crustaceans in the Caribbean can be divided into shrimp, lobsters and crabs. Now assuming we are just talking about seeing these critters underwater, I tend to find the variety of crabs to be the most interesting. Now that is not to say that I do not find the various lobsters to be interesting, its just the variety of crabs seems to be more diverse and that is interesting to me. There are about 45 varieties of crabs in the Caribbean. The largest of which tend to be the channel clinging crabs. I have seen them on quite a few dives in Belize, Mexico, Cayman islands and Dominica. That is not to say they do not live elsewhere in the Caribbean, they do. I just have not had the opportunity to see them.
Now, it seems to me that hermit crabs are the most common crabs I have seen. I have seen them on just about every island or islet I have visited. There appear to be about 11 varieties of hermit crab in the Caribbean, and they range in size from tiny to enormous.
When I was in Cayman Brac this year, while I was diving on a night dive I looked up under a part of a coral ledge and found a plumed hairy crab. He was very shy and very quickly after I got a shot or two of him he crawled back into his hiding hole in the reef.
Arrow crabs almost always make me laugh because they remind me of daddy long legs, but when they are hunting if they are very successful, they stick their prey on top of their heads and just keep hunting.
For me, some of the most productive dives for finding crabs, have been night dives. I guess that is not surprising since that is usually when crustaceans hunt for food. Inasmuch as it looks like I still have about 30 varieties of crab to see, I am going to have to do alot more night dives. 🙂
Where are the turtles? Tobago Caye of course
In the Grenadines, the government has created a marine park in and around Tobago Cayes. Although the park is not particularly large, it is well placed. The marine park is bounded by several small islands and the depth of the water in much of the park is relatively shallow. With shallow water and a white sand bottom, this creates some amazingly pretty turquoises water.
We had barely had time to anchor and we spotted several green sea turtles surfacing for air, only to return to the bottom to feed on turtle grass. We arrived in the afternoon and after lunch we were picked up by a local dive shot to go diving.
I did two dives with a macro set up. The first dive was horseshoe reef. With alot of newby divers we had some challenges, particularly since the current changed twice in about a half an hour. I did manage to get a few interesting critter shots.
After the second dive I switched the camera to a wide angle set up for the next morning when we would go to the marine park looking for green sea turtles.
Unfortunately, no diving was allowed near the island where the turtles were, but on snorkel we were successful in finding sea turtles with which to swim. Below is a video from our swimming with green sea turtles at Tobago Cayes.
The Grenadines: A macro shooter’s paradise?
A relatively small percentage of my time is spent underwater shooting macro subjects. Why? In large part it is much harder for me to spot the small critters that are on a dive and most of the time we do not go to the same dive sites more than once. That means that if I am trying to keep up with the rest of the group of divers, I either shoot wide angle close focus and get quite a few shots, or I shoot macro and get very few shots many of which don’t turn out for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is I often rush the shot.
A peppermint gobey resting on star coral. Take a look at this at 100% and see the incredible detain in his pectoral fin and in the star coral polyps
Nevertheless, I found when I was down in the Grenadines that the amount of small critters to shoot was quite substantial and I didn’t have to wait too long to find shots. Chrismas tree worms have fascinated me for years, so I do take quite a few shots of them. Their structure when spread out in the water allows them to gather the plankton on which they feed very efficiently. The extraordinary detail in each little branch is just amazing. 
Fire worms also have amazing detail in tuffs which carry their venon which when you look, closely resemble small whiskers. 
If you want to get a real sense of what a fire worm looks like, look that this version of the image which is just a 60 percent crop; got to 100 percent crop and in addition to the fire worm you will see a couple legs of an arrow crab.
Each little fiber can pack a punch with its venom — look but don’t touch
Of course, the dimensions of the creature can get very small. I found a secretary blenny who was not much wider than 1mm who made a christmas tree worm look large. The christmas tree worm is on the top right and the blenny is on the bottom left of the image.
But as I mentioned in an earlier post on the blog, sometimes you see something that just isn’t a macro subject ordinarily, but because I can’t change lens underwater, I shoot it with the macro lens and see what we get. Hence, the next image is LOBZILLA, who deserved wide angle treatment because he was huge, think two dinner plates, but he was relegated to macro lens shooting.
At this range, LOBZILLA looks like something from outer space
Thus, there is quite a variety of small creatures to shoot in the Grenadines. But, you should be prepared to shoot the big critters with a macro lens when the opportunity presents itself.
Do you see the details in the mundane?
Closed polyps on a sea whip.
It was not long ago that I was diving in Ambergris Caye in Belize. What struck me was the variety of soft and hard corals.
Nevertheless, on many dives, what got the attention of the divers in my group were the nurse sharks. Now don’t get me wrong, I find large animals, including nurse sharks, to be fascinating to see in the wild. Nurse sharks in the world of sharks are pretty docile and can be approached relatively easily. Keep your fingers to yourself and don’t harrass a nurse shark and you can watch them gracefully swim along the reef. I don’t think I have ever seen as many nurse sharks any where else as I have seen in Ambergris Caye.
Even though the nurse sharks got top billing, the corals were quite intersting. There were many healthy soft and hard corals which were also worthy of comment.
(Polyps of a sea whip unfurled and gathering plankton).
What is interesting to me is that coral are created by large colonies of very small animals. The texture and shape of corals has substantial variety. And, the means and types of food that they feed on can vary fairly dramatically. Some of the corals unfold their polyps and feed on plankton that drifts within reach. The most interesting feeding I have seen corals engage in I observed on a night dive on Grand Cayman. Blood worms were swarming my dive light during the night dive. The dive leader pointed his light at a coral and the blood worms followed the light down to the coral only to be devoured by the coral. It was not what I was expecting, but it was interesting. After a while I started to feel a little bit bad for the blood worms because they were being eaten at a rather rapid rate. But then I got to thinking about how annoying they had been a the beginning of the dive and it occurred to me that it was just part of the circle of life in the ocean.
Star coral was also quite common in Ambergris caye. For me star coral is interesting because it can become enormous. I also find the individual shapes to be quite interesting. Of course, the fact that star coral glows green under blue light also makes it interesting.
So next time you are diving in the deep blue sea and are templed to swim past the coral in search of other more interesting subjects, take a minute or two and look more closely at the coral, you may be glad you did.
