When my flight from Dallas to LA was delayed more than 4 hours and I missed my connecting flight to Manila, I was starting to wonder would it be worth traveling from Dallas to Manila? My concerns were only heightened when I found out later that day that because I missed my flight to Manila my business class seat was gone and I would be flying economy. Ugh. Well I got lucky, even though I had a middle seat in the 777 the guy next to me had bought an extra seat which was empty which almost gave me enough room to be comfortable. I was lucky there was only one empty seat on the whole plane, and it was next to me. Twenty plus hours of flying is not fun. But if you want to see amazing biodiversity, then the Philippines is pretty much a game changer.
In 10 days of diving 3-4 dives a day, I saw a lot of incredible critters. (Yes work occasionally got in the way of diving, but at least not too much of the time).
This trip I spent a lot more time using a snoot to shoot images. A snoot is just a light restricting devise to keep the flash beam of light very narrow so much of the surrounding sub-straight is not lit. Of course that is useful because much of the substraight is not particularly pretty.
I was trying out the backscatter mini flash 2 which does have some very nice features. I would say the focus light is brighter than the mini flash 1, and the switch to turn on the flash has been significantly improved. I just wish they would change the snoot restictor from a slide mechanism to an aperature type arrangement like what is used on the maralux snoot. Now one of the engineers I met in the Philippines had modified his mini flash and printed out on a three D printer an aperature devise that worked with his mini flash. Wish I was an engineer but alas I can break almost anything without even trying and certainly putting a new devise in a flash is just way beyond my skills.
To give you as sense of the difference between the biodiversity in the Caribbean which is close to home for me, and the Philippines consider the difference in diversity of nudibranchs (shell less mollusks). The Caribbean has maybe a few more than a dozen different nudibranchs. The Philippines has over 1,000 different nudibranchs and they are still finding previously undescribed nudibranchs.
This was my third trip and the question I always ponder: Was there any overlap between the critters I saw this trip and my two prior trips, –In a word: yes. But there were still creatures I have not previously seen. So will I go back to see if there are still more critters different critters to see, yep.