Underwater Photo of the Week

Hi Gang!

Lucky me, I just spent a week diving with Captain Steve in Maui. At least I was very lucky last week. I am home now. Darn!

It was typical Maui in the wintertime.  The whale activity was off the charts as I wrote about last week when I shared my first-ever good image of a breaching whale. No doubt about it, I love seeing Maui’s humpbacks, but there is a lot more to the diving in Maui than “just whales”.

We enjoyed encounters with big pods of spinner dolphins, green turtles, day octopuses, whitetip reef sharks and more. No doubt, marine wildlife abounds, and the underwater terrain can be visually stunning. Two of my favorite sites are known as First Cathedral and Second Cathedral. These two natural two-story grottos are located off the nearby island of Lanai where we often dive with Captain Steve.

This week’s POTW, a shot of a black coral tree that hangs near one entrance with the Captain in the background was taken during a dive at Second Cathedral. The Cathedrals of Lanai are collapsed lava domes, and these iconic dive sites are known for the flickering shafts of light that stream through openings in the high ceilings. There is plenty of room to move around in the cathedral-like structures and you will always be able to see your way clear to at least one exit. The setting is an underwater image maker’s dream come true, and the presence of schools of goatfish, bright red soldierfish, slipper lobsters, crabs, the occasional green turtle and whitetip, and walls covered with clumps of orange tube corals are icing on the photographic cake. The dive is relatively shallow with a maximum depth of only 55 feet or so, meaning there is plenty of time to relax and look around, and for photographer’s to find the best options given the conditions of the day.

I used a Tokina 10-17 zoom on a Nikon D300 with two Ikelite DS 160 strobes to capture this week’s POTW. The photographic keys for this shot were to take a good light meter reading on the blue water to determine the desired f/stop, and then once that f/stop has been set to calculate the power setting for the strobes given my strobe-to-subject distance. One other factor that came into play for this shot was to make sure the model’s body was not hidden by the black coral tree. It isn’t always easy for the model to see the photographer due to the lighting conditions as the model is looking into the darkness of the grotto. Positioned inside of the Cathedral, the photographer has a good view of the silhouette of the model. The bottom line is that it helps to have some established pre-dive signals with your model (good idea Captain- Thanks!).

I hope you enjoy this week’s POTW and that you get to dive the Cathedrals of Lanai with Captain Steve before too long. It is not a dive that is easy to forget.

A quick aside: This week was my first chance to dive on Hawaiian Rafting Adventures’ new dive boat. The boat is a 37-foot long Naiad rigid-hull inflatable, and she is an ideal diving craft for Hawaii’s waters. Entries and exits are a breeze, she’s fast, there is plenty of onboard space between dives, and the ride is easy on the back and kidneys even when the wind and seas kick up a bit.

See you next week!

Marty