Mantas! Raja Ampat

The last stop on our trip was Dampier Strait where a place called Blue Magic really lived up to its name.

You don’t often here complaints of too many fish on a diving trip but sometimes the little fish would obscure the action! There were thousands of them.

As I was starting to go up for my safety stop these two mantas were swimming around and around next to me at 7m. It was really magical.

I have some video, Mantas are much more impressive when you see them moving but I need to process it so stay tuned for more updates

Mangroves, Raja Ampat

Our next stop of our little tour of Raja Ampat was in the area of Yanggefo where there are mangroves. We dived a dive site called Citrus Ridge and snorkelled up to the mangroves. They weren’t as pretty as the blue water mangroves we saw last time but we didnt fancy getting eaten by the crocodiles!

Earlier in the trip some of the group had snorkelled out to take split shots and I didn’t go because I was told I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere with such a small dome (about 3.5″ mini dome). Since I’m someone who likes to try things for herself I swam off to try under-over (half in and half out of the water) shots with my tiny camera. I came up with the image above which everyone was really surprised by.

Citrus Ridge is a divesite full of cool critters. We found this jawfish with eggs sitting in his hole on the sea floor. And this woebegone shark hiding under a coral shelf, chockfull of colourful soft corals.

The mangroves are a nursery for all manor of juvenile fish. We even saw a couple of baby reef sharks cruising back and forth.

These little stripy fish are called Archer fish because they spit water up into the trees to knock down inspects into the water to eat.

Arborek Jetty, Raja Ampat

Following the Algae Patch, the next place in Raja Ampat we visited was the area of Mansuar. Here we visited Aerborek Jetty. Under the jetty was a very cute little ball of fish which we had great fun photographing.

When we surfaced we saw a double rainbow! The ship pulling away here is a conservation boat which travels the area teaching the local children about conserving the area for the future.

At one point the sea above me suddenly went dark, looking up I saw the most amount of fish I’ve ever seen in one place!

On the jetty beams soft coral and fans have started to grow. Its a really beautiful area.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little slice of Raja Ampat. Please stay tuned, next up the Mangroves….

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…

PhotoFriday – ‘The Body’

This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’The Body’

I missed the last two photo friday themes because I was away in Raja Ampat (Indonesia) with no network connection. Today I wanted to include some photos from there into this post. Usually when you see Peacock Mantis Shrimp you cannot see their body, you see them sitting up out of their hole as above. This little fellow was actually scurrying across the sand from hole to hole. In the photo below you can see that his body is made of corrugated pieces like a coat of armour.

I hope you found this post interesting. Stay tuned over the next few days for more tales from Raja Ampat.

If you want to see more of 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 ‘The Body’ here.

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

New Underwater Video – Bali 2012

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

PhotoFriday – ‘Curvature’

This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Curvature’

Click image to go to see alternate sizes (they look better larger).

I found it difficult to visualise a good photo for this week’s theme immediately. A theme that makes you think hard is both a blessing and a curse, then I came up with too many options to explore! Curvature of the earth (as shown by star trails), curvature that you get with a fisheye lens and my personal fav, the unique curvature of Snell’s window. Since this is (or tries to be) primarily an blog about underwater photography I went with the Snell’s window option. For those of you who’ve never heard this term before it is a phenomenon where when you are underwater and look up you see everything above the surface through a cone of light of width of about 96 degrees. This phenomenon is caused by refraction of light entering water, and is governed by Snell’s Law. The area outside Snell’s window will either be completely dark or will show a reflection of underwater objects. The best photos of snells window come where the surface of the water is calm and you can see through the surface to what is happening above. With these photos, I’m in the mangroves where the trees grow in the water and soft coral has formed on the underwater roots. Through snells window you can see the green leaves of the tree tops above the water.

this is more of a side view in the mangroves:

If you want to see more of my Raja Ampat Mangrove photos then check out other photos in my Raja Ampat Mangrove Gallery.

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

PhotoFriday – ‘Stand Out’

This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Stand Out’

Click image to go to see alternate sizes.

This here is a sea slug of some kind (I’m not sure if he is a Nudibranch or a Flat worm). Unlike last weeks photofriday submission, this little chap is not aiming for camouflage. He likes to stand out. His lively colours announce to the world (and any creature that would like to eat him) “Watch out! I’m toxic. Do not eat me!” I found him crawling along the rocks underwater in Raja Ampat, Indonesia.

Click here to see the rest of my Raja Ampat underwater gallery.

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