Watch this video in High Definition on Vimeo here.
This is my second Bali video. I do hope you like it. If you have any film making tips to help me (I’m such a newbie with video) then please let me know in the comments. This was shot on a GoPro Hero 2 in the GoPro dive housing with the backscatter magic filter on it. Edited in iMovie. Music: “Dire News” by Celestial Aeon Project
Wishing everyone a happy new year 
So here is my first underwater video (well the first one I got around to processing). I did take some footage of the whalesharks in mexico but I’m get to go through that. This is from Bali and its just Jacks…. schooling Jackfish at Coral Garden. I hope you like it….
If you cant see the embedded version (or just want to see it bigger HD) the link to it on vimeo is here:
I’ve called it just Jacks because I took some footage of other reef life and next up is to see if I can make a video from that too. Thanks for watching.
As a follow on from Chac Mool & Taj Mahal, I know I promised you even more Cenotes from mexico and I got a bit side tracked with other things but I didnt forget. Here is my post about the aptly named “Eden”.
From the surface Eden is like a huge swimming pool – very open. In fact some of the kids were jumping off the platform into the water below and some were trying to balance on the rope strung across the middle. In fact it seemed as though it was a busy swimming area for the local families.
In fact they gave us strange looks as we donned all our gear and slipped beneath the water. Once you’d passed all the commotion (being careful that no one landed on your head of course) you could enter a long dark tunnel. Out the other side was calm, empty and very beautiful.
In fact Eden has a little bit of everything. The muck-about swimming area, the cavey tunnel with small stalactites ,the striking sunbeams and a lovely little mangrove area full of tree roots and small fish.
We were able to get out & change lens to macro to enjoy the fish life in the swimming area after we’d seem the cenote itself… I think we all really enjoyed that after several dives with wide angle only:
This little Cichlid Fish protects his babies by trying to hide them in the moss.
And I enjoyed watching these two having a fight over the females…
but they called it a draw and no one got hurt or eaten.
I do hope you’ve enjoyed my little slice of Eden.
So here’s a sobering thought – In 40 Years We Could Face An Ocean Without Fish. Go check out that link and see if you still want to order fish for lunch today 
In fact I’ve seen this decline myself in the lessening aggregations of Snapper in the Red Sea each year.
The theme for this year’s world ocean day is Youth: the Next Wave for Change.
If we can get young people into preserving the ocean now then there might be some life left in it for their children to enjoy… otherwise there will only be the photos we can take today and the sour fishy aftertaste of extinction. Please take a moment today to check out these links and see how you can help – even if it’s only be spreading the word. World Ocean Day – “Wear Blue, Tell Two”. Hopefully this blog post will reach more than two
A while back I put together a list of sustainable seafood guides. They are displayed below in my sidebar but here again for convenience:
Here’s a few of my pictures to celebrate the beauty and life we still have for now:
Please keep help our oceans from turning into this:
This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Downward’
This week’s theme is Downward. Immediately my mind went to these little fish (Shimp fish I think) that swim face down. I’ve only seen them this one time by a bush of black coral in Cebu (in the Philippines) in 2008 when I first got my camera.
If you want to see more of my photos from Cebu then check out other photos in my Cebu Gallery.
See all the other photo Friday entries (and submit your own) for ‘Downward’ here.
Photo Friday entry: ’Eat!’
This week’s theme is EAT! I especially like the ! in the theme. As it turns out I don’t have many photos of underwater eating and not wanting to put up a photo of my lunch I thought I’d put you all off food forever with a photo story of when we meet the Bobbit worm in Lembeh. In scene one you see the worm being tempted by the dive guide with a fish on a pointy stick. In scene two, no more fish! Chomp! Most unpleasant.
Enjoy your weekend everyone and hopefully the good folks at photofriday.com will have a nicer theme for next week.
If you want to see more of the weird creatures of Lembeh then check out other photos in my Lembeh Straits 2009 Gallery.
See all the other photo Friday entries (and submit your own) for ‘Eat!’ here.
Things have a way of coming full circle and this blog is no different. I started it way back when in 2008 mainly to document the impending trauma of upgrading from a compact camera to an SLR (and taking said SLR underwater). When I first got my Nikon D300 and Subal housing I took it all away with me on a Martin Edge trip. I didn’t even know how to open the housing!
As it turns out it wasn’t that much of a trauma 
And although I do miss the nice light (and carry-on friendly) size of my compact I have had a lot of fun with my SLR. Anyway, back to the point, we decided to go on another Martin trip, this time to the South Red Sea.
When we visit the Red Sea we normally go north (the wrecks are better and there are the giant schools of fish in summer). The south has some nice caves (well, caverns really since they are mostly open at the top) where the light comes in. I’m only part way through processing the photos but what I have so far I’ve put in this gallery:
http://www.pbase.com/suzy_walker/redsea2011
I still prefer the North Red Sea (for better viz and just more to see) but going to the see the caves was something different. It would have been nice to see the sea grass area where the large turtles live but we didn’t get to that. Each day we stayed in one place the whole day which had the advantage of trying different things and seeing the light change throughout the day but the disadvantage that if you were underwhelmed on dive 1 then by dive 3 or 4 you were just over it altogether.
check the gallery in the next week or so for more cavey shots…
This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Wildlife’
Click image to go to see alternate sizes.
Click here to see the rest of my ‘Raja Ampat’ gallery.
See all the other photo Friday entries (and submit your own) for ‘Wildlife’ here.
Well, what can I say but what a holiday! There was laughter, there were tears, there was awe, there were men with guns and there are photos. We stayed on the seven seas liveaboard with Alex Mustard and Graham Abbot for 12 days and nights of fantastic diving in Raja Ampat. Raja Ampat is a marine protected area in Indonesia west of Papa New Guinea.
Alex Mustard
Most people in underwater photography circles have heard of him, author of a couple of books (I really liked reefs revealed), numerous articles and judge on some major underwater photographic competitions. In person, Alex was friendly and relaxed. This was a group-lead photo tour rather than one of his specific photo workshops but he was still happy to give advice when asked (which I think we all took great advantage of) and he seemed to genuinely like sitting going through peoples photos with them. I found that it was fascinating to watch a professional photographer at work, from ideas, to subject selection, to shooting technique and finally image selection and rejection. It was good fun to dive with him, he and I almost missed lunch because we were mucking about for too long in the mangroves! As a tour lead he did a great job, especially in the airport to and from Sarong to Manado (the only place where we checked in en masse).
Graham Abbott
We were lucky to have Graham from diving4images.com as our dive guide throughout our stay on the Seven seas (I didn’t actually get to dive with the seven seas dive guide, Tommy). Graham planned the route we would take and what dive sites we would go on and in what order to get the best of our photographic time in Raja Ampat. He has a fish & critter Id book inside his head and is an amazing spotter with eyes like an underwater hawk! He showed everyone what they wanted to see and was very patient when everyone took turns to take photos of the same tiny things. He is a very funny guy, I know that Lena was especially impressed with his underwater modeling and eye crossing techniques.
Seven seas
The liveaboard was one of the most luxurious we’ve been on. The rooms were quite large (for a boat) and ours had ample space underneath the tall king-size bed to store the baggage and useful drawers for clothes and gadgets. The food was very nice, they seemed to have no problem catering for peoples dietary requirements (Alex and I dined on chicken when they served up seafood meals for example) and I never went hungry as there was a steady supply of snacks throughout the day. It seemed like there was a lot of space, it never seemed like there were too many of us. There were several spaces for us to spread out and attend to our cameras on without having to take them down to our rooms.
Diving
The diving operation was very slick. All managed by a lovely American guy called Stuart. He took video throughout the trip that we could buy at the end. The were crew great with handling the cameras and the diving gear. We had three dive boats to dive from (two tender boats and one rib). The tender boats were easier to dive from (they had ladders) but the groups on them were large. There was only ever four divers on the rib – maximum, so I was glad to be on that one with Alex, Mike and sometimes either Stuart or Graham.
The crew were very dedicated, sometimes sitting in the boats in their bright yellow rain macs waiting for us for over an hour. They seemed to know where we were at all times and when we ascended they were there on hand to help us up into the boats. Seeing how ludicrously bad I was at getting into the rib they supplied a little ladder for it which I thought was very sweet
Critters
Well, this holiday certainly had critters galore! I’ve never seen so many fish and such lush and amazing coral in one place. The few days in Lembeh were supposed to allow us to get the macro out of our system. Raja Ampat is billed as a largely wide angle paradise, and while that is most definitely true (I took more wide-angle shots in those 12 days that I have in my life) it didn’t stop the macro lenses creeping back on throughout the week when the two words ‘pygmy’ and ‘seahorse’ were mentioned. I didn’t get to see the Denise ones but I’ve never seen weedy pygmy sea horses before so was especially please to see them. It was also a nudibranch hunters dream, with all different varieties on each dive.
Also, it was the first time Mike and I had ever seen manta rays! It was very exciting to see them and they came so close and they are so big! I think I must be the only person in the world to be intimated but such a gentle creature but they are very, very big.
Mangroves
I loved the day we had in the blue water mangroves. It was such a different and special environment (I wish we’d spent a little longer really). I haven’t processed all the photos from the mangroves yet so I will do an additional blog post later on for that.
Men with guns
We travelled overnight sometimes to get to a new area. One particular morning we had arrived at a new spot, the sea was very calm and it was just past dawn. Speeding across the water was a small boat with 3 or 4 men in it, one toting a rather large machine gun. Not something that one usually sees over breakfast so it made me sit up and take notice. They pulled up and boarded, pirates I thought? Apparently not. Stuart told them to leave the gun in the boat (which they did). Apparently we were rather too close to their pearl farm and they’d had some robberies, they thought we were pirates and had come to check us out lol. Satisfied that we were just a bunch of tourists and not stashing a large oyster string on our boat they moved us on.
Tears
Well almost, I got bitten by a large angry trigger fish that snuck up on my while I was photographing soft coral in the shallows of the ‘The windows’ divesite, his shallows apparently. I was very glad I was wearing wetsuit that day! And no I didn’t take his picture, I was too busy trying to smack him with my camera while he menacingly swam at my head – eek! Luckily for me he didn’t break the skin and a got away cleaning with a massive bruise on my knee and the fright of my life.
Topside
While on a trip such as this one you don’t expect there to be much to shoot above the water (well I don’t anyway), however the landscape was so beautiful I just had to get my camera out of that housing once in a while. Stuart gave us a couple of excellent opportunities for tender boat rides around the small islands between diving. The landscape was just so very green and lush. When I looked carefully I saw a fleeting glimpse of a bright green bird and a brilliant pink bird high up in the trees. We stopped for a minute or so on a small beach with a hut, although I don’t think anyone actually lived there. It did give me a change to try my hand at another 360 panorama but when I loaded all 31 NEF files into photoshop to try and stitch it, it unsurprisingly crashed!
With thanks for a great holiday to Alex, Graham, Stuart & the crew of the Seven Seas, Divequest and everyone on the trip.
click on the following to see the full set of images in each galley:
:: Raja Ampat underwater images ::
:: Raja Ampat Mangroves ::
:: Topside ::
:: Mikes Topside photos :: EDIT: Mikes cancelled his pbase so this gallery may no longer work.
:: Lembeh Strait underwater images ::
All images in this post are clickable to see larger versions and all images are copyright Suzy Walker or Michael Toye.
This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Rough’
Click image to go to see alternate sizes.
Click here to see the rest of my ‘Venice’
gallery.
These little fishes got such a rough deal! Since becoming an
underwater photographer I’m not longer able to eat fish without thinking
murderer! Totally hypocritical on my part since I’m not remotely vegetarian and
if calamari looks like onion rings I’m still tempted.
See all the other photo Friday entries (and submit your own)
for ‘Rough’ here.
