Photo of the Week: May 28, 2012

Hi Gang!

This week’s POTW is the type of image that I categorize as a “money shot”. I don’t mean money in the literal sense; although there is no question that I do make a significant percentage of my living by licensing this type of image. What I mean by the term “money shot” is that so many factors came together at the right time. In essence, everything on this dive in Indonesia was working in my favor.

The yellowmargin moray eel was getting cleaned by a scarlet cleaner shrimp. The shrimp was actually in the moray’s mouth, not just somewhere on the body or head. The eel was facing me, and was in a hole in the reef that I had access to with my camera. There was not any kind of obstruction, and I didn’t have to try to fight to frame out a second or third cleaner that was only partially in the frame. Seeing the tail or only the antennae or claw of another cleaner in a photograph can be really distracting. Both the moray and the shrimp appear to be in good shape, and so on and so forth.

In short, it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t seem to happen very often, but just about the time you want to start beating your head against the wall from losing the battle to factors you cannot control, Mother Nature serves one up on the proverbial silver platter. Call it luck, karma, or whatever else you choose, but everything lines up so that it is your chance to shine. All you have to do is show up and start shooting. Well, that’s almost true. Even with the perfect opportunity served up on a platter you still have to do some things right while avoiding any fatal pitfalls in order to cash in on your opportunity

The following is a synopsis of what I did to maximize my opportunity. First, I had dived on the same reef a few days earlier, and I saw the moray and several cleaner shrimp at work. But I had a wide-angle lens on my camera at that time. However, knowing that cleaning often occurs at the same place on different days, I thought the site was worth taking a chance on. So I set up a macro system and decided to see if I could get an opportunity to photograph an eel getting cleaned by a cleaner shrimp or two

Second, as perfect as the scene was, I knew that things could change in the blink of an eye so I needed to be quick with my camera, without getting in so much of a hurry that I blew the opportunity.

Third, as I always try to do, when I saw that the opportunity might be there for me I looked around the area where I was going to be working so that I could map out an approach to my subject while avoiding the pitfall of crashing into protruding rocks or the spines of sea urchins etc., thus frightening the moray back into its hole and dinging me.

Fourth, before moving into my desired shooting position, I set the controls on my camera and strobes according to my hoped for shooting distance from the eel and the shrimp so that I could minimize my movement once I was in my shooting position. After that, I moved in and composed my shot. I quickly took a number shots while bracketing my exposures once I got into position.

Everything was going according to plan until the eel, for no reason that I understood, suddenly retreated so far back into its hole that I could only barely see it. That signaled the end of my shooting session. Being quick had allowed me to expose in excess of 20 frames, and the image that accompanies this text is my favorite.

I captured the scene with a 60 mm lens mounted on a Nikon D300 camera. I used my Subal housing and a flat port as I typically do when photographing reef creatures. I lit the scene with a pair of Ikelite DS-125 strobes

I hope you enjoy this week’s POTW!

See you next week,

Marty