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….
