Macro World

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Although underwater photography is a relatively new addition to my scuba activities, it is one that I have undertaken with immense passion. Photography can easily triple or quadruple your total scuba budget! I am very fortunate to have been loaned/gifted a compleat Digital SLR camera and housing setup by Andrew Donelson, a scuba friend we'd met on the island of St. Croix almost exactly a year ago today. This rig is the source of over 95% of the wonderful pictures that I have been showing on my Cozumel photo albums. My trip to Cozumel has been an excellent learning theatre for me to refine my photography skills and to stretch the camera's capabilities with different lenses and accessories.

This week I just started diving with a 14mm extension tube on my 17-85mm macro lens. This makes a Super Macro mode with a focal distance ranging from about 1-20cm. In other words, I can pretty much put the tip of the dome port right on the subject and still get it to focus!!! You can imagine how much fun this has been to learn to use. My first trial dive was off the boat pier just a block from where I'm living. Not a particularly gorgeous spot but it does have a surprising variety of fish and coral life... including seahorses, flying gurnards, angelfish, scorpionfish, blennies and the like. Pretty much the same things you see on the reefs you pay $80 to visit but in miniature. That is to say, most of the fishy things are juveniles. (Except for the blennies. They never get very big!)

Today's dive was Tracey and my 5^th anniversary, and my 300^th logged dive to date! What great milestones. We chose to do a shore dive near the south cruise ship pier at a place commonly called The Junkyard because of an old airplane that was sunk here for a movie a long time ago. This is also a popular snorkel location due to its proximity to the cruise ship pier and indeed we often saw people floating above us. I like to think that snorkelers are jealous of us scuba divers because we get to interact with the reef so much more closely, but to tell the truth they probably don't even notice us.

Great close-up shots of all sorts of things I couldn't shoot before! Corals, blennies, jawfish, christmas tree worms, pipefish, even a colourful starfish! Then a reef squid showed up -- definitely one of the more intelligent creatures on the reef, as it played with us, darting all around us and changing all sorts of colours, but never getting too close. Ugh! Wrong lens setup for this type of creature but how I wish I could have caught it on film! It was a big one too. We stayed around watching it for at least 5 minutes until one of us got low on air and called the dive.

It was a fun time, and undoubtedly the best $25 we ever spent to make an 85 minute dive. ($13 for renting two tanks and $12 for taxi trips). "Babieca" was the dive shop at Hotel La Ceiba and they were very friendly with clean facilities. The all-wood pier looked like it had been built yesterday. Diving in and getting out was easy, with things to see as soon as you got in the water. We'll be back!

Notes on the photos

The scorpionfish was the 2nd one I found that dive. It was out in the open and made a perfect photography subject since I could shoot it from several creative angles. Virtually every shot came out in focus. This dive I was experimenting with much higher f-stop and variable flash angles. I learned a lot from this and you can see the results... beautiful shots! This shot is about f/18; normally I shoot underwater about f/8 or f/11. You can see the excellent depth of field. Believe it or not what you see in this picture is full frame.

Anenomes we see virtually every dive but what I find interesting is that each anenome has a different colour for its tips. This one seemed like it hadn't made up its mind yet but I loved the contrast of mauve stalks with tinges of green.

The last picture is a jawfish, which hides in a hole in the sand and "flies" just above it to feed on passing krill or whatever they eat. They are extremely skiddish and I was able to get a good shot of this one only by holding steady for about three minutes until it felt I wasn't a threat. I will note that, like a good scuba photographer, my fins never once touched the coral. I had anchored myself with my left index finger to a rock outcropping while holding the camera and shutter knob with my right.

Notes on Macro Setup

I have only one macro lens, the Canon 17-85mm EF-S. It is a good piece of hardware and has served me well for a wide range of shooting both above water and below. My professional photographer friend Doug Plummer once loaned me a nifty gadget to play with and learn about shooting really small subjects, like bugs in flowers and the hairs on the top of your toe. This magical hardware is the Canon EF12-II extension tube which fits both the EF and EF-S series lenses.

I was so impressed that I soon bought one but my intention was to use it in my microcontroller circuit design career and for documenting machining work. I don't think it occurred to me to try it underwater until a few months ago. I wasn't even certain it would work inside the Aquatica dome port -- truth to tell it doesn't quite fit and there are some complications. Namely, the extension makes useless the zoom gear so I can't do any focal point adjustment, and the lens cannot be extended to its fullest macro position so I don't have optimal focusing. Small prices to pay for the results I am getting!

After two dives with this set-up I feel there is still some fine tuning to be done, but I can already see its limitations. Particularly in photo quality. I'll be shopping around for another macro lens (probably one of the Canon "L" lenses) but for now I have to say the EF12-II extension tube is an excellent solution for the price. Which is about $80.