PhotoFriday – ‘Familiar Faces’

This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Familiar Faces’

Although its growing rapidly the warm water diving scene isn’t all that large and we often find ourselves meeting the same people on the trips we take (or even sometimes on the plane going on different trips)! So here is a post where you might recognise some faces. Above is Mike, also known as one half of the Lovebirds and photoshop Guru. Below is a photo of me, also known as the other half of the lovebirds.

This is Jarret, the originator of the term Lovebirds.

Here is Alex & Eleo, totally acting like lovebirds here

This is Kathryn:

This is Lena in her pre-big-camera days..

Here’s one of Kay (we were testing off camera lighting hence the spooky look)

Heres another couple of Mike because after all he is awesome (even if I am bias)!

I hope you’ve enjoyed meeting some of my friends.

If you want to see my underwater photos from various places then check out the galleries in my Reef Beasties Gallery. Or my best from 2012 here.

See all the other photo Friday entries (and submit your own) for ‘Familiar Faces’ here.

Algae Patch, Raja Ampat

Following on from Thursday post about Misool, we continued our journey in Raja Ampat stopping off for a whole day on a muck dive site called the Algae patch. Here we saw many things hiding in the sand and algae. We even saw a baby woebegone shark.

We saw a different types of ghost pipefish – here is the ornate and the robust types. The robust have such great camouflage they look like strips of seaweed twisting in the current.

You’ll have to excuse this video. It’s an experiment with the video mode for the Olympus OMD EM5. I think I had it on all the wrong settings. The cyan colour cast was very horrible (so I desaturated it to black and white) and as you can see I had no stabilisation. However it is very short (only 40 seconds) and theres a surprise about 20 secs in.

feel free to watch the video on vimeo here.

Here are some of the stars of the show…

And last but not least a little crinoid crab clutching some eggs. We saw plenty of these in Bali a few months ago but none with Eggs.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my little recap of the Algae Patch. Stayed tuned for more from Raja Ampat coming up…

Misool, first stop in Raja Ampat

The area of Raja Ampat boasts the highest level of marine biodiversity on the planet. Our first stop as we headed out from Sorong was to the south, the area of Misool. Here we spent several days diving the following spectacular dive sites:

Kalig Wall, Nudi Rock, Boo East, Boo Windows, Barracuda Rock, Wedding Cake, Wayil Island, Yilliet Kecil, Magic Mountain, Boo West, Baby Rock.
Here we saw many amazing critters from Skeleton Shrimp and Pygmy Sea horses, to sea snakes, to sea fans that grow bigger than a person.

This tiny pygmy squid we saw on a night dive was particularly adorable!

Each morning and evening we were treated to beautiful skies. I tried to capture them with my iPhone in panorama mode:

At the Boo Windows dive site there was a school of very friendly Batfish. I happened to have a macro lens on so I took this portrait

The camouflage of the critters is amazing sometimes, see if you can spot the pygmy seahorse in the photo below:

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. There will be more to come from Raja Ampat in the following days…

Back from Raja Ampat

We spent the last two weeks in Indonesia sailing around on Indo Siren liveaboard for Alex Mustard’s latest workshop. Unfortunately Emirates airlines screwed up and we didn’t get our luggage until the day we were heading home! I’d like to thank everyone on the trip who lent us stuff to allow us to still have a good time, especially Alex who allowed me the use of his spare camera so all my photos this time around are from the Olympus OMD EM5 and of course my trusty iPhone.

Below is a little google map showing the areas we visited, click the little blue icons on the map for more info about each section. Over the next week or so I’ll dig out the photos and videos for you all The reefs there are amazing with sometimes challenging conditions (I bought my first reef hook) but chocked full of the most amazing encounters! We saw Mantas, sharks, cool macro critters including pygmy seahorses and squid. Too many times we heard compliants on the boat of too many fish ruining the photos

View Larger Map

More Bali Photos posted….

Over the weekend I finished off processing my Bali photographs and posted on my photography degree blog.

This post is full of the images that didnt make it into the assignment (elements of design) – this is just a small screen grab :

Assignment two – Draft Images.

And this post is the actual assignment post (again just a small screen grab of part of the post):

Assignment two – Elements of design.

Please check them out and see what you think

The Art of Underwater Photography

I’ve just been to Bali (you thought I’d gone quiet). We went on Shannon Conways trip at Scuba Seraya. Mike and I won ourselves another stay there with this image for the end of trip competition:

More images (and video!) to come when I’m less jet lagged. I actually went there with the agenda to do the assignment 2 of my photography course so I’ll be going through that to double check I’ve got good enough versions for the theme. Stay tuned to both blogs.

Here are some others that Mike processed for me… Click the images for larger.

Whalesharks in Mexico

It turns out whalesharks are BIG. I mean intellectually I know they are the biggest fish in the sea, but when you get really close up – they are BIG. And in Isla Mujeres in Mexico at this time of the year, there are LOTs. We were fortunate enough to find ourselves on the wetpixel whale sharks trip lead by Alex Mustard at the end of last month. Wow. On the first day the captain estimated around 300-400 sharks. It certainly felt like it. Every time I turn around another one had snuck up on me, it was amazing. And as a diver who’s pathologically afraid of snorkelling (I know I know go ahead and laugh) a massive fish sneaking up on you when you’re already feeling completely sea sick (forgot to make my pills until we were underway that first day, I was ok the rest of the trip) should scare the crap out of you – but no, they didn’t. They were just wonderful. Much less scary than mantas. I felt very peaceful. Here are my photos (which dont do them justice unfortunately) so maybe you can enjoy them from the comfort of you’re armchair And by the end of the week I was no longer afraid of snorkelling either – I didnt drown – yay me!

As you can see from the photos they swim along with their mouths open to hoover up all the tuna eggs suspended in the water. The eggs tend to float which is why they feed at the surface. When they feel comfortable sometime the “bottle feed”, which is where they just up end and stay static in once place feeding at the surface as below:

Quite often there were so many they caused a traffic jam & had to swim under each other:

It was nice to get out there early before all the hordes of boats came along:

We didnt just see whalesharks though. Sometimes the remora (small fish that hitch a ride with larger fish by hooking on) came to check us out, after finding us lacking in interest they would swim back to their whalesharks. And a couple of times we saw some mobula rays fly past.

If you want to see more of my whaleshark pics they were in this gallery here (along with the Cenote photos but I’ll be featuring them in some posts here soon anyway).

New Photos from Cayman

As most of you know it was the Queens Jubilee here in the UK this past weekend and amongst the bunting and the cucumber sandwiches was a whole extra day off work (we love 4 day weekends, thanks very much your majesty). So, I put it to good use to tackle some of my underwater photography backlog from the past year or so. So firstly here are some more photos from my Grand Cayman trip in early 2011…. the whole gallery is here.

PhotoFriday – ‘Portraiture’

This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Portraiture’

This week’s theme is Portraiture. I’m not usually good at taking photos of people, not really my thing, but when all else fails and there’s no nice fish to take a photo of underwater – there is always your buddy Especially if they are doing something silly. The trick to a nice underwater portrait is getting the light into the mask. Its much harder to get light into your own mask as you see from my silly self portrait at the bottom of the post…

Here are some examples from underwater around the globe. (Click image to go to see alternate sizes (they look better larger)).

If you want to see more of my underwater photos then check out other photos in my Underwater set of Galleries.

See all the other photo Friday entries (and submit your own) for ‘Portraiture’ here.

PhotoFriday – ‘Day’s End’

This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Day’s End’

This week’s theme is Day’s End. I expected everyone to put a sunset photo in so I tried to be different with a bit of stars & rocks action. I almost put this cheesy sunset photo I took at the end of a days diving in Egypt in for the theme but managed to hold myself back

If you want to see more of my Namibia photos then check out other photos in my Namibia 2011 Gallery.

See all the other photo Friday entries (and submit your own) for ‘Day’s End’ here.