Capturing the Moment

Dwarf Moray Eel White Mouth Moray Eel    Moray Heaven!   Back on Maui for a quick visit we had to fit in a dive at one of our favorite shore dive locations, five graves. This is the same location that all the tour operators have dubbed to be "Turtle Town", but we weren't going diving for turtles. Instead we look for nudibranchs, frogfish, and other hard to find creatures that may escape the usual glimpse from the snorkel masses.   Our dive quickly turned into a moray eel bonanza. We had several dwarf morays, cute little 6-8 inch fully grown, and some huge white mouth moray eels about 3 ft long. An undulated moray showed off its razor sharp teeth and a zebra moray contrasted with its toothless grin. As I tried to get a picture right down the mouth of the undulated a large fish swam in between my camera lens and the eel. This happens sometimes as I concentrate on getting the picture, but this time the fish stayed there, which is a little abnormal. So I glanc...

Even though your classes will tell you to never do it, sometimes for the underwater photographer a solo dive can allow you to go your own pace. It does increase the risk a little but as long as you stay within a breaths distance of the surface the added risk is minimal. Today I headed out to visit one of my favorite location off the South Maui coast to get a different perspective. I often look for very small nudibranchs but today I aimed to get a bigger picture and different views. I punched up my shutter speed to get some fish pictures and worked with my white balance to get some contrasting reef scenes. And what turned out to be one of my favorites shown here to the right was taken from inside a cave where you can freedive into and then surface inside of. The light entering the cave is reflected off the surface of the water inside the cave. Two turtles shared this space with me as I set up for this shot. I don't often spend alot of time taking fish shots unless its somethi...