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.

Sunset splits

I'm a fan

The waters around Drawaqa Island in Fiji have many beautiful gorgonian fans. I wanted to capture the essence of diving with them, both their size and their bright red colouration under lights, so I placed the silouette of a diver in the background for context.

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.

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.