Ok, I dialed in my shooting after my last go of it. If you missed part 1 of this post you can check it out here: Part 1: Mirrors Underwater
What I am doing is taking a small rectangular mirror underwater with me on my scuba dives. I'm finding small, but beautiful subjects like nudibranchs and flatworms to move onto the mirror before having a little photo shoot with them. You can see the photos in my last post were ok, but the water was a bit murky and the nudibranchs were just ok. Now I took my method on the road.... to the famous Lembeh Strait of Indonesia.
This is the muck diving capital of the world. That means diving on bottoms other than reef. Usually it is black sand or silt. You wouldn't think that this would be a very fruitful place to dive but let me tell you, it is like a magical wonderland of weird and exotic underwater creatures. Nudibranchs, frogfish, sea horses, shrimps, crabs, and all different types of octopus can be found here.
My subjects for these dives are fragile sea slugs, called nudibranchs... and one flatworm. You will see how amazingly beautiful they can be. However I didn't want to hurt any of the animals. So first I would search for beautiful nudibranchs that were on small rocks that I could move and place onto the mirror. Otherwise I would patiently wait for them to crawl onto the mirror. This way I was able to capture some very unique underwater photographs with minimum disturbance to the animals.
I hope you enjoy the shots. They are a culmination of a lot of attemps and trial and error.
Two risbecia tryoni nudibranchs reflected in all their glory.
I call this 'Nudibranch kiss', although it is just one nudibranch reflected in the mirror
The patterns of nudibranchs are quite astounding.
Diving at night while using underwater strobes gave me this beautiful black background of the mirror
Mirror, mirror, on the sea floor...
Striking colors
This is the only subject that wasn't a nudibranch. This is a flatworm. They can also have beautiful colors and patterns and are most often seen at night.
My mirror did break after this last dive while in transit, so I'll have to get another. Now I am hooked on what is possible when you think outside the box with photography. I hope you enjoyed
-Dai Mar
Check it out on pinmapple.com here:
[//]:# (!pinmapple 1.460664 lat 125.241240 long Diving with Mirrors d3scr)