When you gotta go, you gotta go. Unless there's a plumose anemone living on your toilet.
Another dive at Porteau Cove. This time I had the wide-angle lens on, which in retrospect was probably was not the best choice for the dive given the poor visibility. There were a lot of particles in the water, and the sun was shining bright causing both flaring on the lense in the shallower waters, illuminating particles even if I didn’t use the flash. I’ve still got to figure out how to mitigate those issues. I ended up taking the lens off part way through the dive.
Even though I’m not overly happy with the technical aspects of the photos I took on this trip, it’s all a learning process so I’m taking notes for the next dive. That said, I did get some interesting photos, which hopefully show some of the interesting things that can be found underwater, whether natural or man-made!
Lion's Mane
One of my favorite photos to date is the one to the right of the Lion’s Mane Jelly! As we were swimming back towards shore to end our dive (We don’t like surface swimming, we vastly prefer to head back along the bottom using a compass) we came across a couple of these large alien-like creatures.
Unfortunately the camera wasn’t set up to take both raw and jpeg at the time so I was stuck with using the Gimp’s level tool to fix up the white balance. Using the “Auto Level” function (The lazy/easy way), I ended up with the reds really being brought out. While the real Lion’s Mane wasn’t quite as red, I found the effect so surreal and awesome that I decided to leave the photo like that. The observant reader will notice that this photo is the basis for this website’s background. (At least as of this typing, I may change it in the future)
Between snaps of the Lion’s Mane, I managed to get a short clip of it swimming. If you look carefully you can almost see how long it’s tentacles are!
More photos after the jump..
