Black & White

You don't see a lot of black and white shots taken underwater.  And for good reason -- they don't really work.  At least not for me.  I'm not sure why since the early attempts at black and white photography underwater, say, everything from William Beebe's pre-Great Depression shots, all the way up through Cousteau's and Hans Hass's stuff in the 50s and early 60s, is just fantastic.  But a lot of that is probably due to their historical significance.   Black and white shots taken underwater nowadays, though, tend to strike me as gimmicky.  Again, just my opinion.

That being said, when I felt like trying something different earlier this week, processing a few recent shots as black and white seemed like the thing to do.  And what better subject than nudibranchs -- animals known for their beautiful colors.  I guess what I wanted to see was whether stripping them of those colors would make it easier to focus on something else, something like form, function, maybe texture.

So I spent a few hours dodging and burning, applying overlays and whatnot, things I never usually do.  I can't say that the monochromatic results have brought out anything in them for me that's otherwise obscured by color.  But I'll give them some time and space, take another look in a month or so -- see if anything jumps out.

Eastport Photos

Just got back from a couple of weeks of diving in Eastport, Maine.  The diving itself was great; photographically, though, not so much.  Here are a few of the shots.

Nudibranch attacking a hydroid.  What I like are the colors and how uncluttered it feels.

I spent a while with this hermit while he was checking out a potential new shell.  He examined it from pretty much every angle, and even when he walked away from it, he stayed close by, eyeballing it from a distance.

This is the kind of shot I usually hate. And to be honest, I'm not sure I like this one either. There's no focal point, nothing happening. My prediction: within a week, this shot will be buried deep in an invertebrate folder, never to be seen again.

Just a nudibranch moving over a timber but I backed off a bit so you can see more of the surrounding area.

I really like this shot even though it's not immediately obvious what's happening in it.  A huge moon jelly was caught up in some urchins and the northern red anemone on the right had moved in to start feeding on it.  The jelly didn't have a chance. 

Wolffish are just so beautifully ugly.

Here's a nudibranch  laying out an egg string.  You can see the eggs just starting to pile up on the stalk of the hydroid.  There's nothing in the shot to give a sense scale but the nudibranch was huge.

Dawson Street – Eastport, Maine

Met up with Connie Bishop and John Prendergast for a high tide dive this afternoon.  A short time later, John and Val showed up as well.  Been a few years since I’ve dived here. 

These walls are just packed with life.  My favorite parts are the vertical crevices.  Lots of nudibranchs, starfish, and sculpin, and countless other colorful invertebrates.  

The hard part for me, as always, is swimming over the rock fields.  My tendency is to pass over them quickly but, like most places that aren’t obviously interesting, I have to keep telling myself that I don’t necessarily know what's there.  It's not so much a lesson that I keep forgetting, but one that just never really sinks in.  And sure enough, found a beautiful brittle star out and about on the rocks

.  You really do have to slow down and keep your eyes open.  Excellent dive.

Custom House Beach – Deer Island, New Brunswick

Great couple of dives today.  The whole area here’s been through some changes, though, thanks to tropical storm Arthur.  By the way, what’s a tropical storm doing in Canada.  It must have taken a wrong turn somewhere around Cape Cod and then refused to stop to ask for directions.           

But it wreaked some real havoc.  Some people are still without electricity or water.  Deer Island seems virtually deserted.  And here at the dive site, the path to the water from the lot is blocked by downed trees.  Sounds like a job for CoJo Diving!                          

Despite the storm, though, dive conditions have ranged from good to fantastic.  And today was on the fantastic end, with viz in the 25- to 30-foot range.  As always, tons of life – northern reds, scuplin, nudis, wolfish, moon jellies.  Didn’t want to come out of the water.   If this isn’t one of the premier dive sites on the east coast, then I don’t know what is.             

The only real downer for me has been the universal lack of reaction up here in the great white north to my Bruins hat.  There’s been no hassling, no gnashing of teeth, no annoyed comments.  They didn't even insist on a search going through customs.  After the Bruins’ chicken sh*t loss to Montreal in the playoffs, they’ve returned to near irrelevance up here.  Well, what are you going to do.  Time to go carve some urchin spines out of my knee.

Later (part deux)

Just a few weeks after clearing out my "Later" folder (http://shinesdiveblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/later.html), it's filling back up again.  Already there are more than 500 new shots in there.  Arghhh!  It might be time to just get rid of that folder and actually deal with images as they come in.  At least it's recent enough that I still have some recollection of taking these shots.

Back Beach Night Dive

First night dive of the year.  I've been waiting about 9 months for this.  And what a beautiful night, with a sky full of stars and air temps just right.

Went in about 10:30 hoping to find squid.  And squid I found.  Not a lot -- certainly not as many as we'll be seeing later in the summer -- but I did come across five or six.  All were medium-sized and curious enough to come in close and stick around.  Of course, there were also a lot of lobster about, as well as sleeping cunner and a couple of big ravens.

As always on night dives, at the end I came up so that I was looking straight up at the sky and could see the stars while still underwater.  I love that.  And when I came out, I turned around on the beach and took a shot back toward Rockport across the water.

The funny thing is, for years when I've dived here at night, I've noticed faint beams of light that seem to cut their way horizontally through the water.  I've always wondered what they were, and at times thought they were just my imagination.  But looking at the photo (below), it suddenly became obvious: they're the lights of Rockport reflecting across -- and through -- the water.

Great dive. Can't wait to do it again.

Old Garden Beach

What a beautiful day.  It's been a while since I've dived here but I didn't want to fight the low tide rocks at Folly, or feed the meters at Back, so that left Old Garden.
    

When I got up to the beach at 9AM, air temps were already up in the 80s.

I went in and headed out to the big ledge, did one circumnavigation of it, then swung out over the boulder fields.  Lobsters everywhere.  Ditto for pollack.  But it was the sea ravens that took me by surprise.  I came across six of them, all of varying shades of red/yellow.

At the end of the dive, spent a long time lingering in the shallows, not wanting to come out.  Just a great day to be in the water.