Eat Or Be Eaten

Every time we go underwater, life and death struggles happen all around us, whether we see them or not. Usually when we think of predators, we think only of sharks.  But that’s just the tip of the food chain iceberg. Everything down there is feeding on something else.  And the vast majority of these life and death struggles happen on a scale so small that it’s easy to swim right by them without even noticing.  Here are a few shots of animals a little further down on the food chain caught in the act of making a meal of one another.

Surface Intervals

One of the best things about diving is how much time you get to spend on, in, or near the water, in between the times you’re under it.  Let’s face it, everything’s better by the water, including photography.  Here are a bunch of shots taken before, after, or in between dives.

This was shot after an early AM dive in Virginia.  There was almost nothing happening underwater so I was pretty happy to come out and find such a beautiful scene on the beach.

I took this after an evening dive at Nahant.  This little park looking back toward Boston is about a mile from Canoe Beach.

I photographed these surf casters on the same morning as shot # 1 above.  

For me, one of the big differences between surface and underwater photography is the requisite shape of the photo.  I’m not sure why but when I take a shot underwater, even if I crop it, I want it to maintain its original shape and proportions.  Not so with surface shots.  For reasons that I again don’t understand, when I take a shot on the surface, I have no compunction whatsoever about cropping it any way I want – which usually means taking something off the top and bottom and ending up with a longer, narrower photo.  I’d love to feel the freedom to do the same with underwater shots.  Maybe someday.  This one was taken at sunrise before heading out to dive in the St. Lawrence up in Quebec. 

Since it’s the dive that dictates when you get to the water, you can’t always set things up to shoot on either side of sunrise and sunset.  Again, though, everything’s better by the water, regardless of time of day, even shots like this late morning one taken at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester.   

Ditto for this afternoon shot taken in fairly harsh sunlight after a dive on the Cape.

Of course, I had to include at least one night shot.  I came out of the water after an early evening dive at Back Beach in Rockport and found the sidewalk crowded with people waiting to see the moon rise up over Bearskin Neck.  It turned out it was the super full moon – the night when the moon is at its closest point to the Earth for that calendar year.  I went back to dive again the next night and made sure to bring a tripod.  I grabbed this shot almost as soon as I came out of the water. 

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.