Tag Archives: scuba

PhotoFriday – ‘Natural Light’

by

This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Natural Light’

Quite often I go underwater and turn off my strobes and just shoot with the natural light. The most spectacular and dramatic lighting comes in from shafts of sun shining in at the tops of caves or through the beams of jettys. The photo above was taken in a Mexican Cenote (a giant cavern filled with fresh water). So next time you find yourself in a dark place, try turning off the lights and see what natural light there is.

The best place to take natural light subjects underwater in the open ocean is as you can imagine right at the surface. The warm mexican sun makes the surface reflect this whaleshark and makes the tiny eggs (the food the whalesharks are there to gather) glint and sparkle in the sunshine

You can see more whaleshark and cenote photos here.

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 ‘Natural Light’ here.

PS: I’m currently selling the camera that took these photos. Click here for more details & the full list of equipment for sale or email me at scubasuzy-sellingnikongear@yahoo.co.uk. Thanks for supporting my work!

PhotoFriday – ‘Familiar Faces’

by

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

by

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

by

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…

PhotoFriday – ‘Serene’

by

This week’s Photo Friday entry: ’Serene’

One of the most serene places is underwater in the warm ocean. You only hear your breath and the snap, crackle and pop of the reef. Floating weightless and free. Its my favourite feeling. This photo was taken of Libby in the caves at the southern end of the Red sea, Egypt.

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 ‘Serene’ here.

New Underwater Video – Bali 2012

by

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 :)

Schooling Jacks video

by

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:

http://vimeo.com/55734500

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.