Hide and Seek

This Bannerfish found a perfect hiding place in a thicket of Whip Coral. The whip corals look a dark brown colour underwater until one shines light on them, and this blended wonderfully with the black and white stripes of the Bannerfish.

Full steam ahead

This marbled stingray barreled through our group of divers at top speed, scattering divers left, right and centre. At the Fish Factory dive site in the Maldives there is ample food for these rays, but it's frequently a race to see which ray can get to a bit of food first. In the rush to get in position for this shot and avoid a head-on collision with the ray, I must have bumped my left strobe as only the right one fired, by chance creating the pleasing gradient from yellow to green to blue in the background sand and coral.

Mapped

Map pufferfish (Arothron mappa) have beautiful cryptic patterns on their skin, in particular camouflaging the location of their eyes. I wanted to capture the beauty of this disruptive camouflage so chose a black and white representation of this.

Manta Way

Drawaqa Island in Fiji is home to a channel between two islands where Reef Manta Rays (Mobula alfredi) patrol up and down both feeding and being cleaned at cleaning stations. This individual was particularly curious: I'd recently jumped in the water and hadn't yet set up my strobes so the first two times she approached me I just floated on the surface and let her approach on her own terms. She must have been particularly curious about my camera as she came back for a third pass and this time I ducked just under the surface to get a shot of her swimming over the top of me. To me this is such a great example of the gentle, inquisitive nature of Manta Rays.

Stay focussed

At Kuata Island in Fiji we would regularly have 30+ Bull Sharks join us for the shark feed that we run. During COVID the feed was stopped and I was lucky enough to join a group of shark scientists who used the restarting of this feeding as an opportunity to better understand the behaviour of the local population. I wanted to capture the speed and grace of these beautiful creatures and the way that as apex predators they demand your fully focussed attention while you're underwater with them, so used a slow shutter speed and tracking motion to achieve this.

Catfish Constellation

Juvenile striped eel catfish form tightly packed shoals and roam around the reef looking like a single super-organism. I wanted to capture this duality - individualism in the context of a greater whole, and this required the shoal to be neatly packed together and all facing me. This required predicting the direction that the catfish would swim in, then swimming down and lying on the sandy bottom on breath-hold, waiting with baited breath to see whether they would approach despite my presence.

A feast of fluorescence

Night diving with fluorescent lights opens up an ethereal world and is a bit like a treasure hunt as you never know what's going to light up in interesting patterns as you shine your blue torch over the reef. As I passed this brightly fluorescing Acropora coral, I noticed something swaying on top of it which was also fluroescing. To my astonishment this was a Decorator Crab which had covered its body in anemones for protection from predators. These anemones also fluoresce brightly under blue light, and between the anemones and the coral these two fluorescing sources of light then reflected off the crab's carapace to illuminate the (non-fluorescent) crab. I had an opportunity for 2 shots before this crab scuttled away to a darker and more protected part of the reef, but fortunately that was enough to get this shot. This was shot with a blue video light for spotting, 2x Retra Pro X strobes with excitation filters to produce most of the blue light, and a yellow filter to block any of this blue light from returning to the camera lens so that any light captured by the sensor is due to fluorescence.

The eroded top of a massive boulder coral provides a home for a number of other coral species. Taken in the late afternoon at Barefoot Manta Resort, Fiji.

The Safety Stop

The Safety Stop. Coming soon to a dive near you... I love taking photos of divers during safety stops. It both connects you with the rest of the dive group and is an apology of sorts for them having to wait around endlessly during the dive while you sat in one spot taking a million photos of the same thing. This group of divers personified what I love about divers - a nice bunch of people having a great time underwater - and I love the depth of personality shown in this photo.