RSS - PostsThis is the first of a new feature I’m adding called “Behind the Shot” to explain how and where I took the photo.
Have a look at this baby boxfish. They’re the cutest thing you’ll ever see underwater.
Location: Yap, Federated States of Micronesia
Dive Site: Slow and Easy
Depth: 14 meters
Story:
Even though Yap is known for its larger animals like mantas and sharks, it does have excellent macro in a couple of places. The folks at Manta Bay Resort can show you where.
On this dive, the outer reefs were beaten up by the waves in the afternoon wind. So we rigged from wide-angle photography gear to macro. After a very short boat ride from the dive center, we dropped into Slow and Easy.
Slow and Easy has a moderate sandy slope from 8 meters down to 25+ (I haven’t been that deep there). There are large boulders up top in the 5-8 meter depths and they have a lot of interesting life there like pipefish, blennies, and lizardfish.
On this dive, I was with Elaine, as usual. As soon as we finished our decent, she started working a hermit crab and I started to swim slowly and scan for things to shoot. You know, the basic beginning of a macro dive.
There was a 70-cm round depression. You’ll see this a lot on the sandy bottom, usually uphill from a rock and off to one side. I’ll scan these quite a bit because they collect floating materials like grass, seaweed, etc. This was no exception, and the name of the game that day was “eel grass”. There was quite a bit of it lining the depression.
I took out my pointer stick and started to look around under the eel grass, gently lifting up individual pieces. Some movement caught my eye. What really caught my eye was how everything was drifting away slowly with the current except for a 2mm pea which was holding its position and even going up-current.
With things this small, you don’t really know what it looks like, even with good light. But you can see it using your camera and a supermacro diopter: they turn your camera into a microscope. I got a focus lock on a nearby piece of sand and then held up the camera to view the green ball in it. All I could see was 2 big eyes staring back at me. So I turned on my strobes and followed the pea for a bit, taking photos as it moved around.
I moved the camera in and out until it looked like the eyes were in focus and then pushed the shutter. This was harder than you might think. The boxfish was moving. I was moving to chase it. The camera was moving because I had to hold it in mid-water.
I got maybe a total of 10 shots. Then when I looked down to refocus closer to the end of the lens, I couldn’t find the boxfish again.
After the dive I had to research on Google to find out what it was that I found.
Lessons Learned:
Take a test photo underwater as soon as you descend and adjust your exposure so that it’s good. This will reduce the amount of time that it takes to start taking pictures when you find a subject.
Go slow when you dive and learn how to hunt. Nothing beats time underwater for building skills and intuition at hunting.
If you know that a subject is rare, small, and moving, it’s best to take a handful of photos with your existing camera settings then make major adjustments like adding another diopter.
See You Underwater
–Mike