Photo of the Week: January 23, 2012

Hi Gang!

In southern California when the stars line up, meaning the weather and water conditions are at their best, the thing to do is to drop whatever else you are doing, load your cameras and get wet. This bit of California diving advice is especially true during the winter months when you can’t count on good conditions. Lucky me, with great conditions in our area that is exactly what I did yesterday to welcome in the New Year. I went diving on the Eureka oil rig out of Long Beach, California with a few friends, and we enjoyed relatively calm seas, some sunshine and very good visibility for winter water in my home waters.

Here’s a bit about the oil rigs: A series of oil rigs stretch along the California coast from the Long Beach (just south of Los Angeles) area to Santa Maria which is just south of Monterey Bay near the middle of the state. Some of the rigs have been decommissioned and some are still operational. A number of the rigs are built in relatively deep water with their support structure being secured on the seafloor as deep as 600 to 700 hundred feet below the surface. The various support pillars and cross beams create a reef-like oasis for all kinds of creatures ranging from tiny invertebrates to fishes, California sea lions and any number of open ocean creatures that swim by at times to take a look. The rigs are no-take zones, and over the years they have become wonderful artificial reefs for divers to explore when conditions are favorable.

This week’s POTW is an image of a California sea lion swimming over the end of a pipe on the Eureka oil platform that is encrusted with a dense carpet of colorful corynactis anemones and white metridium anemones. Corynatic anemones are sometimes referred to as strawberry anemones due to the brilliant red hues of some specimens, but these corallimorphs (close relatives of anemones) occur in many hues. Metridium anemones, the white anemones in the photograph, are sometimes called plumose anemones.

It is quite common to encounter California sea lions around the rigs. They can easily haul out of the water on some of the structure that is above the water line, and there is plenty of food available for them in the water around the platform.

I created this week’s POTW with a Tokina 10-to-17 mm zoom lens in a Subal housing. At 10 mm the lens is a fisheye with a field-of-view of 180 degrees. For this photograph I had the lens set to 10 mm so I could get close to the encrusted pipe and still capture the wide, colorful foreground. Even with the great conditions and a slightly upward shooting angle I was using an f/stop of f/4. Even when we consider the conditions to be really good, southern California waters can be a bit dark and green, and that is why I used such a wide open aperture. Using an f/stop of f/4 and being very close to my foreground meant I needed to use a low power setting on my Ikelite DS-161 strobes.

I hope you enjoy this week’s POTW! I am going to share another image from my first dives in 2012 in next week’s POTW.

See you next week, and my best wishes for a Happy 2012 To All of You!

Marty