Ever wondered how fish keep clean? They visit a cleaning station! Little fish & shrimp eat away the tiny particles in exchange for not being eaten by bigger fish. Above a smaller fish makes a nice job of cleaning a bat fish’s eye (in the red sea) and below our dive guide gets the once over by the little teeth cleaning crew in Lembeh. Little cleaner shrimp are so keen they even try & clean my camera for me!

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

This week’s theme is Cloudy. The clouds & the morning fog in this Florida sunrise is as cloudy as I like it while I’m on vacation. Click it to see it larger (it looks better but my blog isnt wide enough).

If you want to see more of my Florida photos (although they are more manatees than landscapes) then check out other photos in my Florida 2011 Gallery.

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

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.

I’d especially like to thank Mark Graf and Michael Toye for being my blogs most active commenters.

the blog posts that you guys liked the most this year were
Best Photos 2010
What’s in my dive bag?
Reef sharks in Grand Cayman

so thank you all for taking an interesting in my photography!

If you’d like to see my favourite photos from 2011 I blogged the top ten here: Best Photos 2011.

If you’d like to subscribe to my blog you can either Follow it on wordpress or use the email subscription button at the top right of this blog page.

Jazz Hands.  I was mucking about on a dull dive in Cayman with my buddy and I love this one. For me it all comes together, the silly pose that made me laugh so hard my mask filled up, the outrageous lighting on the sides of the hands making them look massive in the forced perspective. A nice lit up mask (sometimes the masks can cause nasty shadows). The fact that you can see his fin and the dark edge of the reef are nice touches to add depth. And of course what a handsome model

Kittewake squid.  This little battalion of squid seem to live up in the shallows by the mast of the Kittiwake wreck in Grand Cayman. I wanted to capture the sense that they were guarding the ship. I have another shot of them splaying out under the sunrays but I think this one tells the story I wanted to capture a little better.

Inside the tug boat.  Tiny fish stream around inside a shipwrecked tug boat in the south Red Sea. I like the sense of movement in this one and the blue cast from the windows in the background setting the context.

Blenny in a hole.  Blog post here for more blennies. The blennies expression makes this one for me.

Ray close up.  I like this shot of a Cayman Stingray better than some of the other more graceful ones I took. Its unusual and I love the texture on him and his expression as he presses against my glass dome port. The rays here were expecting food and I was glad to capture the in-your-face nature of our encounter with them.

Manatee in the sunshine.  I loved the manatees so much this one had to be in my top ten.

Blue room.  I very much enjoyed our land-based trip this year to Namibia (despite no diving *gasp*). My favourite part was the abandoned mining village. It was the major reason for us going there and I’d have liked one more day wandering around. I prefer this view of the blue room over the more usual symmetrical view because I like the slightly off-kilter through-many-doors-and-windows feeling. With this view you see a way in (or out) of the room (and the frame) via the window and then your eyes are lead through the rooms and tantalised with a hint of a fourth room (one last edge of a doorway) which you don’t get to see if you are straight on and symmetrical.

Milkyway.  I loved Deadvlei (in Namibia). During the day it’s amazing and surreal orange and blue. Landscape straight out of a Dali painting. At night something the stars are brighter than I’ve ever seen in my life. My first foray into night photography and stars. I enjoyed playing around with the star trails shots (even though they didn’t come out right) but I still prefer the straight up majesty of the static star shots.

Dune sunset.  A special treat in Namibia was my first trip up in a microlight. I like this moody aerial shot of the last of the sunlight just catching the edge of a massive sand dune.

Giraffe Greeting.  Giraffe love as two giraffe greet each other nearby the waterhole where we were parked in Etosha. I’d never seen giraffes outside of a zoo before so this was a rare treat for me.

Honourable mentions: As with previous years choosing ten was very hard. Here are a few others that I’ve liked and a whole bunch more in my best 2011 gallery on pbase .

I was very lucky in 2011 to visit so many wonderful places that I have not even been able to go through all my photographs so I’ve choose these from the selection of photographs that were taken, processed & put on my pbase site in 2011. I hope you enjoyed this look back with me.

I’m very much looking forward to 2012, Happy New Year everyone!

This week’s theme is Depth Perception. With photographs (and painting & drawing) we are representing 3D subjects in 2D. Our eyes are tricked into believing the scene by clever use of lighting, depth of field, scale and perspective. If you light from the front with a ring flash for example and that is your only light, you tend to lose the essential shadows on your subject making the scene more graphical in nature. In underwater photography we also have another sense of depth. We can see deep into the photo as with a topside photo but we also might like to convey that we are at a depth underwater! (click images to see them larger).

We can use lines leading into the distance

To create more depth into the photo we can include the dark looming reefs in the background.

To create a sense of depth under the sea we can shoot outwards and use the natural blue gradient that is lighter nearer the surface and deeper blue as you look down.

We can also include well known larger items in the background to use scale to achieve our sense of depth. Background subjects like boats and divers are great for this.

these red sponges are missing something… a diver would look great in the background

Shipwreck photos create a nice sense of depth

Theres photos are from all over the world, if you want to see more of my underwater photos then check out my Galleries Collection.

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

This week’s theme is Graceful.) I thought I focus on the Stingrays of Grand Cayman, since pretty much everything we see underwater is graceful (apart from some of the divers)! Graceful implies movement so video would be a much better medium for this challenge as its quite difficult to display the true grace of these animals in still photographs. I’ve given it a go though, let me know what you think in the comments

and here is one not looking so graceful trying to climb into my camera

If you want to see more of my Grand Cayman photos then check out other photos in my Cayman 2010 and Cayman 2011 Galleries.

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

This week’s theme is Rugged. We don’t go to many places that are rugged so this week’s theme was quite hard for me. One place sprang to mind though, back in 2005 we went shore diving in Bonaire. The beach there was quite rugged in places (as you see from the photo above with my lovely young man in it) and some of the shore entry points were quite hazardous. I probably would have fared better with thicker soled booties but I’ve not been overly fond of shore diving ever since. I should probably reprocess this photo, I’d quite like to crop out a bit of the sky.

If you want to see more of my Bonaire photos then check out other photos in my Bonaire 2005 Gallery. There arn’t many though because I was not all that inspired by Bonaire underwater (plus it was a long time ago when my rate of “keepers” was not as high as it is now).

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

This week’s theme is Noon. For traditional photography shots noon is not a great time to be out making photographs. The light is harsh and from overhead creating hard shadows. For underwater its a great time (in fact any time is a great time). The light is high overhead and reaches further into the depths which is great for natural light wide angle shots and for using magic filters.

If you want to see more of my red sea photos then check out other photos in my Red Sea 2010 Gallery.

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