Photo of the Week: January 04, 2010

Hi Gang!

I am going to take you to Hawaii once again for this week’s POTW, a nighttime shot of a larval slipper lobster riding atop a jellyfish. Several species of slipper lobsters inhabit caves and lava tubes (pukas) in Hawaiian waters, but it is not common to encounter them in their larval stage because slipper lobsters spend their larval stage floating in the water column in the open sea before they settle out of the water column to live in reef communities as juveniles and adults.

I captured this week’s POTW photograph off the Big Island. When I tripped the shutter I was only about 10 feet below the surface, but the sea floor below me was several thousand feet deep as we were diving several miles offshore. Let me assure you that is an exhilarating place to be in the middle of a dark night!

All kinds of thoughts go through your head. At least they went through mine. On the one hand, I felt like I was really fortunate to be seeing part of our planet that very few people ever get to explore. On the other hand, I felt like a delicious piece of defenseless bait floating in the darkness. Not a wonderful feeling!

As soon as I saw some crazy looking creature I would quit thinking about being bait and concentrate on trying to figure out what I was looking at. That feeling lasted until I accidentally brushed up against one of the hang lines or caught sight of another diver or the boat’s sea anchor out of the corner of my eye. That will definitely give your heart a start!

I didn’t know what a lot of the animals floating by me were the first time I made one of these open water, black water dives. This was my third black water dive off Kona, and by then I was starting to recognize a few of the critters that drifted or swam by me in the plankton soup of the open sea.

During the three black water dives I have made off Kona I have seen a variety of gelatinous creatures that have names that leave a lot of divers scratching their head wondering what the heck I am talking about. What I am talking about are creatures such as Venus’s girdle, pteropods (aka sea butterflies), heteropods, salps, comb jellies and other ctenophores. Scratching your head yet? Good for you if you are familiar with all of these creatures, but don’t be too disappointed in yourself if you are not. That would simply put you in a category with a lot of other divers.

Of course, not all of the black water creatures are gelatinous animals. Black water divers in Kona have seen pelagic seahorses, pelagic octopuses, all kinds of larval fishes including flatfish, moray eels, and even a larval swordfish. I am telling you, it is a bizarre, but very exciting world out there!

About feeling like a piece of bait: On occasions the divers have seen dolphins, oceanic whitetip sharks, silky sharks and even a blue shark. You know, things that either go bump in the night, or at the very least, make you think about the shadows that are swimming on the edge of your visibility. Spooky!

Well, back to this week’s POTW. Photographing gelatinous creatures always presents a challenge because you never know if gelatinous creatures are going to reflect much of the strobe light that strikes them, or if light from your strobe(s) is going to pass right through them without bouncing back to your camera. That makes getting a proper exposure quite a challenge.

One way to overcome that problem is to backlight the animals with the sun. Good idea, but it isn’t likely to happen at night. Another way is to bracket your exposures, and vary your strobe-to-subject distance as well as your lighting angle. For this week’s POTW I chose a frame in which I used an f/stop of f/13 when using an ISO of 400. I was shooting from a distance of about one-foot away, a shooting distance in which I would normally use f/22, so there was about a two f/stop difference between the f/stop I would have used with a solid subject that reflected more light and the f/stop that proved best for this particular gelatinous subject. 

Another challenge that comes with black water photography is the fact that a lot of the potential subjects you encounter are animals that don’t like light. Many are vertical migrators, animals that only come near the surface under the cover of darkness. Illuminate them with a light and they are off to the races. That said, there are some creatures that don’t seem to mind being in the beam of a dive light. The first time I made a black water dive I used the dimmest light I could get away with, but that made focusing really difficult, especially with hard to see translucent subjects like a larval slipper lobster riding on the bell of a jellyfish. I certainly couldn’t use my camera’s auto-focus feature under those conditions, and manually focusing was tough to do.

On this dive I decided to use the brightest dive light/focusing light that I could and concentrate on photographing animals that didn’t flee from my lights.

I know that diving in the open sea at night is not every diver’s cup of tea, but I certainly recommend it if it appeals to you. Go with an experienced dive operator, and my bet is that you will have one of the more memorable dives of your diving career.

I hope you enjoy this week’s POTW.

See you next week!

Marty