I bought a decent camera and underwater enclosure before this trip, but hadn’t used it. I didn’t trust my buoyancy and general underwater abilities. Then I didn’t want to use it on the first dive with a dive shop, because I wanted to ensure I showed my best set of skills the first time.
Well I got to use it today!
We went to Devil’s Hole. It’s the same place I went to for my very first dive in Greece. At that time, my skills were very rusty, I hadn’t yet done the advanced course, and the instructor with me didn’t want us to go down into the hole.
Today…
It’s about 30 meters deep and the opening is about 3 meters wide. Down at the bottom there’s a grate covering an entrance to an extremely dangerous cave. We did not go there.
I was fiddling with the camera a lot, trying to get things sorted.
Let me introduce you to backscatter.
It’s what happens when you take a photo underwater with a flash, but there are lots of particulates between you and your subject, so all you see is a bunch of white dots.
If you get closer to your subject, things look much better.
Once I figured out how close I needed to be, I started getting good shots.
I didn’t get too close to this octopus, mostly because I don’t have great control over swimming backwards yet. I didn’t want my “I’m done shooting” signal to be pushing off one of the rocks that may be on top of it.
Of course there were fish.
I’m often above them, because if I got close they’d swim away.
But some had patience.
Lots of color on the reef.
Life in all shapes.
And sizes.
These guys are tough, because if you get close they suck in all those long tendrils.
Schools of fish were a bit hard to capture. I turned the flash off for this one, but had to do a lot of work in Photoshop to make it look at all reasonable.
Then my favorite: a fire worm. Don’t touch these suckers or you’ll be in pain for hours. They won’t kill a human, but they’ll give you a bad day. In the worst cases they can even cause nausea and swelling.
I have three more dives lined up. One each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Friday will be from the shore like today in a similar location. The weekend dives will be from the boat.
Fingers crossed the camera keeps working this well!
Travel 