A dash of colour

We quite frequently bump into fleets of Bigfin Reef Squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana) while snorkeling in the late afternoon around Lady Elliot Island in Australia. They're funny animals as they're inquisitive enough to approach you but stay just far enough away from you to make them difficult to photograph well. However, with proper lighting and a boatload of patience it's possible to capture their beautiful colouration, which they use for both camouflage and communication with one another.

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.

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.