Photo of the Week: October 18, 2010

Hi Gang!

Lucky me, I have been diving all over Fiji for the past month. I spent a week on the liveaboard Nai'a- a great boat!- and then went to the resorts Wananavu, Waidroka, paradise and Matava. All different and all wonderful! The bottom line form here is, if you get a chance to go to Fiji, go! It is a wonderful place to dive, and the Fijian people are guaranteed to blow you away. In my experience they are the world's kindest and most gracious hosts. Fijians don't just serve you, they engage and interact with you. They are fun, funny and very welcoming to their guests.

Back to diving and this week's POTW, a shot of a male cardinalfish with a mouthful of eggs. The photograph was taken while I was the resort of Matava on the island of Kadavu. As is the case with many Fijian destinations, Kadavu is well known for its massive hard coral walls, soft corals, and passes that are filled with sharks, groupers, manta rays, tunas, jacks and turtles etc. Because of the tides that greatly influence the direction and intensity of the currents we dived the passes in the mornings during my trip. For the afternoon dives sometimes we went back to the passes, but one day I decided to dive a small reef that is inside of the lagoon.

The rarely dived reef is so small that you can easily swim around it in less than a minute, and it is only about 12 feet tall. Isolated in a big sand flat, it is the only reef structure around for several hundred yards in any direction, and it is, in essence, an oasis for reef creatures. Seemingly insignificant upon first glance, the reef is named No Name Reef.

I have dived similarly situated reefs over the years, and often they prove to be rather uninteresting. But every once in a while, they are teeming with life, and that is definitely the case with No Name Reef. On a single dive I saw four species of shrimps, a pair of brilliant red lobster, two species of eels, three species of groupers, several species of cardinalfish, two schools of sweepers, a handful of nudibranchs, and a partridge in a pear tree. Okay, I got a little carried away here, but No Name Reef is a virtual Noah's Ark of Fijian reef creatures.

One of the challenges that we face as photographers, especially when we go someplace that is new to us, is that there is so much to photograph that it is hard to stay with any one subject long enough to do it justice before you feel compelled to photograph another creature a few feet away. Giving in to the urge to photograph every possible subject is usually the path to mediocre images and disappointment, but even when you know that you face the dilemma of how to concentrate your efforts.

I had some success during the dive, but I knew there was much more to accomplish so I asked to get a second crack at No Name Reef, and I am really glad I did. As soon as I got to the reef on the second dive the cardinalfish featured in this week's POTW caught my eye. There was just something about the fish that was "different".

In cardinalfishes (family Apogonidae), males brood the fertilized eggs of their mates by holding them in their mouths. These constantly on duty Mr. Moms flush the eggs with oxygen and protect them until they hatch. In a twist in nature, in the majority of cardinalfishes the male broods the eggs in his mouth and he gets no help from the dead-beat female, while in other species, the females play an active role in the brooding process.

I held my distance while keeping my eyes on the cardinalfish. After about two minutes the male suddenly opened his mouth and rotated the mass of eggs. Bingo! I knew what I was going to try to photograph, and I also knew that getting a good shot was not going to be easy.

The first thing I had to do after I had identified my photographic target was to get close enough to fill a pleasing percentage of my frame with the fish and the eggs when the male had its mouth open- a few seconds every few minutes- without causing the fish feel threatened and flee or turn away from me.

Easy does it! I made sure to achieve neutral buoyancy and then ever so slowly I approached the fish. Before I made my first move I set my aperture and strobe powers so that I could minimize my movements once I was within shooting range. Once I got to my desired shooting distance I composed, focused and waited. I was hovering in the water column, and holding my position was not easy, but I managed to do so without frightening the fish. After a few minutes the male opened its mouth and rotated the eggs, but as he did he moved slightly closer to me, and as I was shooting I realized that the mouth and eggs were not going to be in sharp focus.

Focusing on the fish's lips and then moving back about one-half inch, I tried again. That formula worked, and after a few more tries I got the shot that is this week's POTW. I hope you enjoy it!

As I sign out for this week, I'd like to encourage you to explore small patch reefs in sand flats. In many instances there is not much going on, but every once in a while these tiny oasis prove to be a critter lover's gold mine.

See you next week,

Marty