I’ve always thought that crabs were pretty interesting creatures. Six legs — walk in any direction and have a hard shell to protect them. Not too bad. Maybe I am imagining it but they seem to have interesting personalities.
A hermit crab with his own anemone and greenery
An arrow crab feeding at night
When I think about it, I think I have seen more crabs at night or under poor light than I have under bright sunny conditions. I guess that is probably pretty telling.
porcelain crab fishing for dinner
plumed hairy crab
Given the diversity of crabs I think I will keep my eyes open to see more crabs that I have not previously seen.
Aiar Ghelber on Rebreather with Maria on open circuit in Cozumel
With the pandemic of 2020, last year was the longest surface interval I’ve had in a long time. It’s been hard not getting back to blue water for so long because for me it provides a opportunity to get away from the office and to explore an environment that is completely different. There are so many things to see in the deep blue sea, and yet it is relatively quiet. Of course on a good day you can hear the fish feeding on algae on the reef. Unfortunately, Dallas is nowhere near any blue water. Although diving in some local lakes did provide some opportunity to see some aquatic life in 20202, the variety of marine life in Texas lakes pales by comparison with almost any blue water I’ve ever seen.
When the opportunity came to dive Cozumel in February 2021, I jumped at it. Thank you Gulf Coast Scuba for inviting me to join the trip and bring my rebreather and my camera. Thank you for making all of the arrangements with the local dive shop Deep Exposure who made sure we had sorb, tanks and boosted 02 and made sure we saw a variety of dive sites.
We had a very capable group of divers on the trip most of whom were open circuit divers, but three of us dove rebreather‘s.
Mike and Maria exploring the reef on a sunny day
Here are my general observations of the trip. First Cozumel like most dive communities around the world, has been hit pretty hard by the pandemic. Although Cozumel may have started opening up over six months ago, Cozumel at this time has nowhere near the crowds of people who typically travel there to dive.
Second, the locals seem to be doing a pretty good job at trying to keep Covid under control. There was lots of hand “tequila” and masks were used indoors, but less so outside.
Third, the reefs look to be in pretty good shape because there hasn’t been a lot of diving pressure on them for about a year. There was nowhere near the crowd of divers on the reef today. It was nothing like what I recalled from years past.
School master and grunt hiding under a sponge
Diving my Hollis prism rebreather on the reef was challenging and exciting. As usual in Cozumel the current was moving pretty quickly. It was not uncommon to have 2 plus knots of current to drift long the walls. Since several of our dives were in the 80 minute range we covered a lot of reef in each dive.
As long as you were not headed into the current the rebreather was fine. The few places where we had to cut across the current even though it was for just a short distance it was very challenging.
But, the thing that was most fascinating to me was how close we could get to the fish and aquatic life while on the rebreathers. Open circuit divers could not even begin to approach how close we could get. We had quite a few turtles practically swim right up to us and we had fish that were so close we could have petted them if we wanted to.
Silver sailor fish hiding under sponges
Another challenge, the underwater camera housing, lights, etc that I dive with act like a sail in the current. Even though the camera system is almost neutrally bouyant it’s bulk was still a pretty good challenge to handle.
We did have some technical challenges. Before leaving on the trip I had replaced all three sensors for my rebreather. I tested them in the pool. They were fine. I got to Cozumel they failed. I would’ve been cooked had it not been for the one of the co-owners of Gulf Coast scuba, Aiar Ghelber who came up with three new sensors for my rebreather. I think in the future I will probably travel with 3 backup sensors, just to be on the safe side.
Trying to get the camera in position to take pictures that looked like something was not an easy endeavor based on the current. In fact, it was exhausting. But ultimately I did get a few shots that I like.
So is it time to go back to Cozumel? Well I might wait a week or two to catch up at work, but hopefully reasonably soon I will be back.
Well 2020 has been a tough year in so many ways. Lock downs, quarantines and more. But the forced pause has made me remember that I am thankful for so many people and relationships in my life. So hopefully in 2021 we will get to travel, get to see friends and family, and get to go diving in all of the places we missed in 2020.
Pork fish over shagrila reef
I’ve been told by people who have been back in the water that some of the sea creatures that we have not seen for a while have made a comeback because of the lack of presence by people. Well I hope that is right because then there is hope that the sea can make a recovery over time.
So my hope is that when we get to go back to diving in the deep blue sea that we all see and appreciate the wonderful sea life that is there.
The RMS Rhône dive is an iconic dive. It has a lot of history. It has an interesting story, and for a wreck that has been down for over 150 years it still has quite a bit of structure to see and photograph.
The first time I dove the Rhône, the weather was poor and getting in and out of the dingy was a real challenge. But once we got down below 15 feet the water was clear and the wreck was a lot of fun to explore. The wheel house was still intact and it still had a world class lobster living in it. Between 2010 and 2018 a hurricane went through BVI and damaged the wheelhouse and made it unsafe to enter, and did further damage to the rest of the remains of the wreck.
The last time I dove the Rhône, we had pretty good weather but the visibility was not quite as good, but still at least in the 80 foot range.
Part of the remains of the structure of the wreck
The remains of the wheelhouse, are not safe to go inside of today, but there are more schools of fish around the wreck site because no fishing was allowed in 2018.
Twisted ribs of the Rhone
If you were wondering how powerful the hurricane was that hit BVI, consider this this part of the Rhone was in about 90 feet of water. Twist iron ribs in 90 feet of water, that seems to me to be a lot of force.
The remnants of the checker board flooring with red rope sponges.
Grunts and snappers swimming around the condenser.
I’m hopeful to get back to the Rhone wreck again in 2022. If I could get enough dives on the wreck, I might even consider doing one of the dives as a macro dive because there do appear to be quite a few small critter that have taken up residence.
Don’t get me wrong, I can be quite happy looking for subjects to shoot in a tide pool. The little fish, crabs and shrimp can keep me entertained for hours. But there is something about seeing large animals in their natural environment and being in the water with them that just holds my attention. Big animals often are a big gamble. They don’t always show up when and where we are expecting. Take the first day of our trip to Tonga. After getting bounced around in an aluminum hull boat for about 6 hours in six to ten foot swells we found a momma whale and her calf. We tried to get in the water with her quickly only to see her head the other way and make it pretty hard for us to get close. Of course it was interesting to see the animals in the water, it sure would have been nice to see them for a bit longer. Of course, day three was much better, but there were a lot of hours of hurry up and wait. As you might guess patience is not one of my virtues.
Manta rays off the coast of Kona
I would say that the Manta’s in Kona were very punctual at least on the day we were there. Thirteen big animals in one place during a dive is pretty special. They were almost like a well choreographed ballet swimming through the dive site. I guess I was pretty wound up at the time because one of the mantas bumped me as I was swimming back to the boat and I did not even realize it. But there was video of it; I guess i should have gotten a copy.
Tiger sharks in Fiji
If you feed them they will come. Well, seeing three 13 foot to 16 foot tiger sharks is pretty interesting. Add food into the equation and it does seem to assure that the sharks will show up. The challenge is how do you keep enough control so it is safe. Well, 4 foot aluminum hooks help, but so does a lot of local experience. I still have mixed emotions about feeding sharks. Feed them and you are teaching them to expect food from divers. Don’t feed them and you are unlikely to see them. But I digress. Having a mature tiger shark swim within 6 inches of your underwater camera will get your heart pumping and your breathing rate up a bit. Just glad all went well while we were there.
I was looking through some images from the different places I have been and it struck me that when we refer to blue water, that there are a nearly infinite variety of shades of blue that we see underwater. Well maybe not an infinite, but there seem to be a lot. Some of the clearest blue water I can remember seeing was in Tonga. Yep those hump back whales swim in pretty blue water.
Momma whale with calf
But then there is blue water that just seemed even bluer to me maybe because I was ready to get out of the swim through or just tired of having someone swim over me.
See the guy in front he swam over both of us; would not want to wash his wetsuit
Then there is blue water that sometimes just shocks people, I guess because it is so full of life .
Diving is exciting, just try to keep things under control
Sometimes even when we are fairly deep the water is so clear it just seems more like diving in gin, except without the alcohol.
Megan exploring Cistern Point
But regardless of the shade of blue or the depth of the water it is just interesting to me to see what we see in the deep blue sea.
Sometimes I am pretty surprised by the level of detail I see in images after I am done shooting underwater. Now granted looking through a mask into a eye piece of my underwater housing, about an 3/4s of an inch, or the 1.3 inch by 1.3 inch screen is sometimes much harder than it ought to be. The combination of today’s digital cameras and available lenses can make it very clear how much detail some animals eyes contain. Add some magnification with a diopter and what was once less than a quarter of an inch across is now much bigger.
For quite a while I was trying to shoot a pair of pipe fish that were hanging out fairly close to the bottom. One was red, one was green. Even though I had a 60 mm lens on at the time which gives a broader depth of field than a 105mm I was having quite a bit of trouble getting the two pipe fish in one image. I got a couple useable shots but then I decided to get a close as I could with the 60mm and added a subsee 10 diopter (wet lens) and see what the eye looked like. The image above is somewhat cropped but does give you a sense of the detail in the eye of pipe fish. The pipe fishes eye can swivel in all directions somewhat like a flounders eye.
Frog fish eye
For an animal that relies on camouflage to feed, it is somewhat surprising how ornate the eye of a frog fish is. Yes, it is more subtle than the eye of a pipe fish or a flounder, but its design is still interesting.
Eyes of a mantis shrimp
Mantis shrimp can see more bands of light than we can. Their eyes can swivel independently and move in different directions. Although I think it would interesting to be able to see as a mantis shrimp sees, I am afraid it might make me nauseous to be able to have my eyes go in different directions at one time.
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.
As underwater photographers we tend to take what amounts to specialized studio lights down to our underwater studios, also known as the dive site de jour. A fairly common underwater setup has one or two strobes mounted on arms that allow the strobes to be positioned either closer to or farther away from the housing that holds the camera that we are shooting underwater.
If we were shooting topside, by moving the strobes off the camera we would find that we are able to better control the amount and quality of light that is hitting the subject. In topside shooting, generally we get better images if the strobe is not on top of the camera. Joe McNally, a well known studio photographer says: “Any light that originates at the camera is unflattering because you are literally throwing light at your subject.” You are not making a picture you are reducing your camera to the level of a copy machine.
Underwater, we find that moving the strobes off of the top of the camera housing helps us cut down or eliminate back scatter. The water we dive in whether it is fresh water or salt water generally has particles in it so if we are not careful we can highlight all the particulate in the water. Thus if our light source is coming from the camera, that great fish portrait we thought we got, looks like a fish in a snow storm because we illuminated the backscatter and maybe the fish. Yes, some back scattter can be cleaned up in post, but it is generally much better to reduce or eliminate the back scatter while we are shooting so we don’t have to spend hours in post trying to fix it, if it is fixable at all.
In general, underwater we re-position the strobes depending on how close the subject is to the camera. If we are shooting wide angle, the bigger the scene, the farther out to the side we position the strobes. The closer the action is to the camera, the closer we tend to bring the strobes in to the housing unless we are doing inward lighting for instance. (Inward lighting is turning the strobe heads in toward the camera so that the cone of light coming out of the strobes only lights the subject with the edge of the cone of light).
Topside photographers have long used multiple light sources and also use light shaping tools to help them manage the light resources that they use to create images. When I first started hearing the lingo of studio photographers I started to wonder if I would ever understand it, let alone understand what the various tools of the trade did and how they were used. The first time I heard a description of how to get a shot using two soft boxes, a rim light, barn doors and a snoot, I though oh boy this is going to take a while to figure all of this out. Well that is true, with any light shaping device there is a learning curve. Joe McNally’s book “The Moment it Clicks” is a pretty good book on understanding some of the lingo and concepts of shaping the light for topside photographers. According to Joe: “A snoot is any device that forms a tube around your light source to funnel it and make it more directional.” p. 28 n.2.
Why would we want to make light more directional when we are shooting underwater? Usually it is because the background that the critter we found is in either a confusing background or one that detracts from the image.
Hypselodoris bullockii shot a few moments later with a snoot
For underwater photographers snoots come in about 3 different varieties, all of which are designed to make the light that comes out of your strobe more directional. The simplest designed snoots look like a funnel from your kitchen that attaches to the front element of your strobe. A slight refinement to that design has an internal laser aiming light. Cool more technology, another battery to carry. At the time I first bought a snoot, the snoot with the laser aiming device would not fit my strobe. So I went with the simple funnel design.
Snoot with restricting cone on the leftSnoot with restricting cone attached
A somewhat more complicated design is the snoot made by Retra. In addition to providing the underwater photographer a variety of sizes and shapes of light that come out of the snoot, Retra also adds a lens that helps focus the light. One aspect of the Retra snoot that is obvious even when you first pick it up is its weight. It weighs a lot more than the other snoots on the market. Underwater, weight can be compensated for using float arms or floats, but it is something that you will want to try to compensate for otherwise you could find that it is difficult to have your rig balanced which can add another layer of difficulty to the project of shooting with a snoot. The blue ring octopus above was shot with a Retra snoot. As you can see Retra makes snoots for quite a few strobes.
The third design for a snoot is to use optical fibers inside one or more arms that allows the photographer to bend the arm or arms to aim at the subject.
So how do you use a snoot. Generally what I was taught and what I have seen a number of underwater photographers do, is attach the snoot to the strobe on the opposite side of the rig from camera shutter release button. From there it was try to position the strobe with the snoot attached so the light comes out either as top light aimed down at the subject or at an acute angle. Aiming a snoot in this matter seemed to me somewhat akin to patting my head and rubbing my tummy. With my left hand I was trying to aim the snooted light and with my right hand I was trying to control the camera and take a picture. Once the snoot was properly aimed then snap the picture — easy right, not really.
Fortunately for me the first time I was using a snoot the dive guide who was locating the critters for us helped me aim. So assuming you have to aim the snoot by your self are there any suggestions? Yes, find a pebble or other small item at the start of the dive. Aim the snoot at the pebble and through trial and error get the snooted light to illuminate the pebble so you can take a picture. Then what you do for non-pebble subjects is use the same set up and the snooted light should be pretty close. Adjust as you take shots. On a dive site with no current and a subject that is not moving at all that approach will probably work. The problem is that to the extent we have current or we have to do much swimming to get to the next subject there is a pretty good chance the strobe arm with the snoot will move a bit. Since you are narrowing the cone of light it seems to me that we could spend a lot of time trying to deal with snoot positioning and a lot less time focused on the subject. Is there a solution? Perhaps.
Ask almost any engineer and they will tell you that one of the most stable shapes is a triangle. So in this set up, our snoot base starts with a triangle which uses two float arms attached together at the top with a triple clamp. The two float arms are attached to the housing by single clamps which as you can see forms a triangle using the camera housing as a base. The triple clamp at the top attaches to a short extension tube which connects to a clamp and then is attached to another extension arm. The extension tube is then attached to a clamp which is attached to the strobe. The strobe with snoot is pointed down towards the subject and once aimed the clamp attached to the snoot can be tightened so the snoot will not move. On the extension tube that is closest to the strobe you will probably need to add some floats otherwise the strobe will cause the rig to be top heavy and be constantly leaning forward. Alternatively, you could use a float arm as the last extension tube which would provide buoyancy so the strobe will be less likely to cause the rig to lean forward. The concept for this arrangement of the float arms is referred to as the “wolf” set up and was developed by Ze’ev Kirshenboim. After testing out the wolf set up I think that is provides a very stable base and it simplifies the aiming problem. Instead of having to think about aiming in three dimensions it limits the aiming to forward and backward.
What I found from experimenting with the wolf set up is that even with objects that are less than a 1/4 inch across, the aiming could be done reasonably effectively.
The image on the left is the unrestricted snoot. The image on the right is the image shot with the restictor on the snoot. For my shooting process, I think I will probably shoot without the restictor and then tighten up the shot, assuming the critter is small enough, and will use the restrictor in subsequent images. Now the water in North Texas just needs to warm up a bit and I will go back in the water.
