dancingfish news

We are on the tail end of our trip to Triton Bay, Raja Ampat and Bali, and are currently relaxing in Ubud at the Alam Indah. It’s been a good trip, if not as productive as last year. Here are a few random shots from the trip.

And because I don’t want all my postings to be about photo contest wins, I’m going to post one of my favorite images from my November trip to Raja Ampat. Wire coral gobies can make interesting subjects because they come in all different colors and sizes and are on all different colors and sizes of wire coral. They are also quite a challenge to shoot sometimes, depending on conditions. This wire coral goby was on a very lush wire coral, and looked almost as though he was hiding in a bed of flowers.

The second gallery I’m posting today is from my trip to Raja Ampat in Indonesia:

Raja Ampat Gallery

As always, there are multimedia slideshows for PC (exe, best quality) or mac/linux (Flash).

Here are a few photos from the trip:

I have been a laggard and not yet posted about my recent galleries that I added from my November trips. The first one is my Galapagos gallery:

Galapagos Gallery

There are multimedia slideshows listed there for either PC (best quality), or Flash that can be viewed on Macs or linux machines.

Here are a few photos from the trip that were not posted in my trip post previously:

Right after we returned from the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, we turned right around and went to Raja Ampat in Indonesia (West Papua) for some warm water diving and time in the tropics. This was a terrific trip for underwater photography, organized and run by Deb Fugitt of City Seahorse. Here are a few photos from the trip:

I’m back from the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. This is a fascinating area, and I had a wonderful trip. Here are a few images from the trip.

Another Lembeh favorite for today, and this time it’s a common subject, a clown anemonefish. Common, but always lovely, I enjoy shooting these guys.

Gotta love Nemo!!

After only just recently posting my Keystone images (what few there were) from last September’s trip to Whidbey Island, we went up this last weekend to dive again. I did two dives, but have no photos from the first dive due to a camera configuration error on my part. I was also trying out a modification for my AF-ON button, which I use for autofocus, but which was very hard for me to reach, especially with dry gloves on, on my new Seatool housing. The modification was a button extender, which seemed to work pretty well, and I enjoyed being able to focus and shoot again (simple pleasures!). Anyway, here are a few photos:

The gallery is here.

Okay, back to posting some favorites from my last Lembeh trip! This is a zebra crab, who makes his home within the poisonous spines of a fire urchin. Fire urchins are beautiful creatures, if not that easy to get along with, and they make a sparkling negative space for this strikingly striped little crab.

14 hardy Wetpixelians gathered for diving in Puget Sound from a Bandito Charters boat on August 17th. Other than Rick and his crew, I knew not a soul on board except remotely through emails and Wetpixel postings. I had great fun, with Carol and Johanna as my dive buddies, and took a few photos along the way. There are some topside photos and underwater contributions from the other participants on this Wetpixel thread.

The sites we went to were Point Defiance – North Wall, and Maury Island Barges. The viz was thick and fairly terrible, but the company was fun. Here are a few of the photos.

I created a virtual gallery of the two dives on the website. The gallery is here.

I’ve finally gotten a few photos up from a trip to Keystone Jetty last September. I had some equipment issues, so it’s miraculous I had any photos at all, but it’s just a few.

The gallery is at http://www.dancingfish.com/gallery/list.php?exhibition=43&ee_lang=eng.

I was able to take in my new Seatool housing and D300 camera yesterday for a dive off one of the Bandito Charters boats. On the first dive, we went to Dalco Wall, the current was ripping, and since it had been a few months since I’d been drysuit diving, I decided to leave the new camera on the boat. Of course, Leslie then found a spiny lumpsucker, which I’d never seen before and would kill to get a photograph of. He was very cute! But the second dive, at Sunrise Beach, was nice as well. Here are a few photos…

There are a few more photos in the new Sunrise Beach gallery at:

sunrise gallery

Wow, I’ve been so busy lately, but didn’t realize it had been quite that long since I posted a favorite photo! Hope that y’all haven’t given up on me.

Today’s favorite is a very cool critter, a peacock mantis shrimp. This little lady is also carrying a large bundle of eggs, protecting them until it is time for them to hatch. I should have posted this one on mother’s day!

This is an interesting criiter, IMHO. The blue ribbon eel starts out all the same sex, and are black with yellow stripes when a juvenile. As they mature, they are males that are a bright blue with yellow stripes. When and if they become a more aged eel, they will have the opportunity to turn female, and all yellow, such as this one. Also known as the “Old maid eel”. However, this is when they reproduce, so these eels are essential to the survival of the species. However, the yellow ones are much more rare than the blue or black ones.

There are some interesting corallimorphs in Sulawesi, but I’m not very good at IDing them. This is a corallimorph with some resident Periclimenes shrimp.

Clownfish are tough subjects. They’re wiggly to the point of being hyperactive, and sometimes they are aggressive and like to chase us photographers around. I was lucky and came across these two posers:

These guys are “false” clownfish, since the true clownfish are Amphiprion percula, and these are Amphiprion oscellaris.

Crinoid shrimp are small reclusive crustaceans that like to hide within the arms of crinoids on the reef. They are so well camoflauged that many divers overlook them. Dive guides will frequently push them out of their hiding places with their pointers, but I don’t like it when they do that. This one, however, was sitting right out on top of an arm, and the dive guide just pointed to it as we came across it. It was a nice, vibrant yellow.

There are numerous fish in the world known as batfish. Strange red-lipped batfish and other varieties that walk on the bottom, as well as the spadefish types. The spadefish types are really beautiful when they are juveniles, sometimes having ultra elongated shapes and vivid colors. Even as a juvenile, a pinnate batfish can be several feet in height, and are usually jet black with a neon orange border when very young. This juvenile was tiny, only an inch or so tall at most, and swam constantly in circles, as the juvies typically do. I’ve wanted a good photo of one of these for ages, but the ones I’ve seen before are typically tucked in a crevice, and are so large that it’s difficult to get a good framing without too much water between. Because this one was tiny and out in the open, it was much easier to photograph, although even so, the constant movement made it hard to get the right perspective.

We encountered many juvenile cuttlefish on this trip to Lembeh, in all different sizes. This was a juvie who was curious about me, but trying to stay a little hidden next to some lavendar colored algae.

It was hard for me to choose my first favorite of the day from this trip. I decided to go with this harlequin shrimp, since I’ve seen harlequins so rarely in the past. I have seen them deep within a cauliflower coral in Kona. I saw a beautiful pair in Papua New Guinea. And I saw a pair in Thailand at Richeliu Rock. We’d heard there was a pair at a dive site in Lembeh Strait, so we talked to the guides and made plans to go there. We saw them on two different dives on this site. The first time, the pair was walking around a small cluster of coral, a cleaning station type area. That is when I took this photo. I believe they were hunting for sea stars, their favorite food. The second time, a few days later, they were away from the coral and hiding in some mucky sponges, along with a red sea star that they were eating, so they had been successful in their hunt. They are beautiful shrimp.