Ok - so time for another assortment, and admittedly it is mostly crabs, but I'm saving some nudibranch shots for the next post, so stay tuned...

- Bill

Ok - so admittedly not as cool as the swimming pigs, but we took a quick excursion between dives to go visit an island with a ton of iguanas...

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/320th sec at f/18. ISO 400. RAW processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

We fed them grapes - on a stick so they wouldn't be able to bite us! They really moved quick to get those grapes...

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/250th sec at f/18. ISO 400. RAW processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

Then they would settle down a bit and pose for some nice photos.

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/320th sec at f/18. ISO 400. RAW processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

And let us get pretty close...

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/120th sec at f/18. ISO 400. RAW processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

Then the smaller curly tailed lizards showed up (luckily we still had some grapes left and were able to sneak a couple past the iguanas to feed them too!

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/160th sec at f/18. ISO 400. RAW processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

Thanks for stopping by!

- Bill

Ok - going to jump ahead because Anya requested I post this one for her...

The always beautiful Lettuce Sea Slug (Elysia crispata).

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/200th sec at f/8. Image Stabilization on. ISO 400. Ikelite Housing and Port and Ikelite 161 Strobe in TTL Mode. Raw conversion in Photoshop CS5.

I should point out that that tiny black dot under its rhinophore is its eye... now you know, and knowing is half the battle! :)

Though - to be honest, we saw many more (and more beautiful) lettuce sea slugs on our Caribbean Explorer trip (check those posts out here).

- Bill

A quick break from the dive trip photos today to share a spider shot.

So I have this obsessive-compulsive behavior when I eat an apple - the first thing I do is to remove the stem. I don't know why, I just do. Anyway, I went to eat an apple I had packed in my lunch, and I noticed a web in the spot where the stem comes out. So I gently remove the stem, and low and behold, there is a small jumping spider that had been living in the web.

Somehow he had survived multiple days in the refrigerator living on that apple, and as a coworker pointed out... of all the millions of apples in the world, that spider managed to pick the right one to decide to hang out on. Not only did he not get squished (which I am sure would have been the reaction most people would have had), he got save in a container, taken home, given his own photo-shoot, and then released into a house plant to be able to stay warm and hopefully survive the winter.

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro, 1/200 sec at f/16. Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX in ETTL mode. ISO 100. RAW processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

Hopefully that doesn't put anyone off from eating apples - out of the hundreds and hundreds of apples I've eaten in my lifetime, this really is the first time I've ever had a spider on one. And yes, this photo is staged... since I wanted to finish my lunch and I had kind of destroyed the web already by removing the stem, I had to put the spider on a different apple once I got home.

- Bill

Ok - I know I have mentioned this in the past, but during night dives, you quite often get swarmed with blood worms. To be honest, I hate them... they are super annoying, they get in the way of your photos (more on that later), and they can swarm your camera and get clumped up in your strobe and you don't notice it and you put your strobe in your camera case and they all die and your camera case smells horrible (yeah - true and quite disgusting story).

Anyway, there are a couple ways you can deal with them on a dive. First, you can just turn your lights out and swim around in the dark for a while and they go away (I had to resort to this several times this trip. It isn't ideal as it does get a bit spooky being down there with no light at all, but if you stay semi-close to another diver, you can sort of see). Second, you can dump them off on another diver - sort of the same principle here, but you just take your light next to theirs, then turn yours off and swim away... the person with a light on gets stuck with all the blood worms.

And then there's option three... feed stuff with them. This time, it is a banded coral shrimp (Stenopus hispidus) that managed to snag one and have a nice meal on me.

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/200th sec at f/6.3. Image Stabilization on. ISO 400. Ikelite Housing and Port and Ikelite 161 Strobe in TTL Mode. Raw conversion and cropped in Photoshop CS5. (mouseover for original uncropped version).

I really should have been shooting with a narrower aperture to get more depth of field, but I did manage to get this one with the focus right on the shrimp's face. Unfortunately, with all those legs and antennae and blood worms swimming around, there is a bit of visual confusion in this shot.

But still, it is one less blood worm in the world, and one happier banded coral shrimp with a full belly.

- Bill

Ugh... Mondays!

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/200th sec at f/9. ISO 400. Ikelite Housing and Port with Ikelite 161 Strobe in eTTL mode. Raw conversion and cropped in Adobe Camera Raw.

- Bill

Ok - time for just an assortment of photos, this batch is of some of the fish we saw on the reef...

Goliath Grouper (Epinephelus itajara)	Hogfish (Lachnolaimus maximus)	Caribbean Reef Shark (Carcharhinus perezii)	Silversides (Atherinidae sp)
Queen Triggerfish (Balistes vetula)	Stoplight Parrotfish (Sparisoma viride)	Blue Chromis (Chromis cyanea)	Nassau Grouper (Epinephelus striatus)

Thanks for stopping by!

- Bill

If you've been following along at home, you'll remember several other entries in this series. I don't know if it a combination of having the macro lens on and really looking at things in more detail, or the slightly reduced peripheral vision I get from wearing my scuba mask (I have a prescription mask, so my peripherals aren't as good), but I just seem to end up being fascinated with the patterns and the beauty in the abstract that I find on the reef...

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/100th sec at f/4. ISO 400. Ikelite Housing and Port with dual Ikelite 161 Strobes. Raw conversion in Adobe Camera Raw.

- Bill

Ok - I'll be honest with you... when the Captain announced during breakfast that the first dive of the day needed to be kept from getting too long so that we could skip the second dive of the day to go see the swimming pigs, I honestly wasn't all that excited. I mean seriously... they're just pigs, right?

Well, sort of... they were just pigs... but it was a pretty cool experience.

As we approached the beach aboard the Sea Dog (the Aqua Cat's tender boat), there was quite the welcoming committee, including some that swam out to greet us.

So yeah - pigs might not be able to fly, but they definitely can swim.

The crew had brought a bag of apples for us to feed the pigs, so we spent some time interacting with them. I have some video that I will share soon (I think I want to put multiple clips together into a single video, and so need some extra time for that).

So yeah, as it turns out, skipping a dive to visit the swimming pigs of the Bahamas really was worth while. Talking to Brigette about it, I guess they have been on the Aqua Cat vessel a couple times before and the opportunity to visit these pigs didn't present itself, so this really was a treat.

Oh - I did learn one more thing...

These pigs really didn't have a problem with hamming it up for the cameras! (HAH! I couldn't pass that one up!)

Thanks for stopping by!

- Bill

Ok - as promised... this trip had sharks... lots of sharks... up close and personal...

Man - that was fun... it gets better and crazier (remember - we've got a shark feeding dive coming up later in the week!)

- Bill