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.