A nice portrait of a Barred Hamlet (Hypoplectrus puella) today. This is another image that honestly at first glance I was about to toss. The positioning isn't as typical as you would think for a fish portrait and the depth of field and the positioning of the focus point ended up giving the photo a fairly soft look. Fortunately, after looking at it a bit, I decided that I really liked the different perspective (and honestly, it ends up doing a good job of drawing attention to those nice iridescent blue spots and lines on its face), and then I thought that perhaps that softer look gives this photo more of a feel of a painting as opposed to a photograph. I still wish I had framed this a little better (the edge of its tail is cropped off) and a tiny bit better focus and eye contact probably would have made it a bit stronger, but all in all, I am really starting to like this shot...

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/250th 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.

More nudi photos tomorrow, so be sure to check back!!!

- Bill

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 - 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

While not technically a nudibranch, Flatworms are still a fun find!

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/120th sec at f/4.5. ISO 1250. Ikelite Housing and Port with dual Ikelite 161 Strobes. Raw conversion in Adobe Camera Raw.

This is apparently a juvenile Lined Flatworm (Pseudoceros crozieri) - I was confused on the identification until a bit of research turned up that the juveniles of this species have that orange border that will fade as they grow into an adult (and that tidbit of information is lodged in my brain forever now!).

- Bill

Well, sharks - Caribbean Reef Sharks to be precise - were probably the marquee critter on this trip, so we might as well get right into them now.
The other diver in this shot is our friend Jim (or "Ferris"), and as the two of us lined up to take shots of this shark, I thought it might be cool to show another diver in the frame. It also helped that I was shooting with the Sigma 10-20mm super-wide-angle lens to let me get plenty of stuff in the frame. What that lens didn't help was maintaining size perspective as it compressed a wide area into the frame making the shark (which is probably about 15 feet away from us) look much smaller than it was (probably about 6-8 feet long).

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM AF at 14mm, 1/120 sec at f/5. ISO 400. Ikelite Housing and Port with dual Ikelite DS 161 Strobes in eTTL mode. Raw conversion Adobe Camera Raw.

There's plenty more to come, so stay tuned...

- Bill