underwater macro week #1
Longnose hawkfish, Raja Ampat, West Papua, Indonesia
Nikon D300 + Sigma 70mm, strobes Sea&Sea YS-250 x 2
this is embedded JPEG scaled and sharpened for screen
Location on Google maps
Wikipedia reference
Here is the start of u/w macro week. I have to say that while I consider myself somewhat proficient in wide angle photo my macro is in completely different state - I would call it embryonic. Shooting macro does not turn me on as much as dramatic pelagic epic big blue wide angle adventure. Idea of spending whole dive sitting next to coral head or fan and looking into viewfinder at microscopic creatures did not completely conquered my mind yet - maybe I still need to dive more and get more of wideangle. Many say and their point is probably valid that diversity of macro life exceeds pelagic by magnitude - so if one gets tired of sharks, whales and rays there is always other world to explore. But I'm not that tired of whales and sharks yet, so 95% of time I have wide-angle dome port attached to my camera :-)
Still during my trips I end-up sometimes at the sites where is nothing to do except shooting macro. This is why I have my magic super-sharp Sigma 60mm lens and macro port. Since I'm amateur and naive macro shooter I can't find something well hidden and rare, and mostly shoot something which is instantly visible and also something I have image of in my head. For example - hawkfish above - pretty, colorful character - but probably already replicated in many hundreds of images which look more or less similar. Now it is my turn - and as with wideangle images I try to avoid using Photoshop as much as possible - check this high-res original embedded JPEG !
Another interesting point about this image is that you can see parasitic isopod attached to the right side of the fish. So there is some drama in this picture after all ! ;)
Yesterday Barcroft Media made another attack on UK tabloids with my image of bull shark accompanying rather sad articles about recent shark accidents in Seychelles - http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3765946/shark-that-killed-Ian-Redmond-guided-by-the-moon-fishermen-claim.html. Problem - in the captions they wrote that it's great white shark ! It's funny and sad at the same time - of course you don't expect Sun editors to be proficient with shark species, and I'm not sure if it is good news for bull to be promoted to GW - many consider bulls more dangerous to people than great whites !
If that piece of unintended humor was not enough for you - check another brilliant one capitalizing on two recent marine events in Russia - http://razumnyi.livejournal.com/205142.html :-)) !