I’m still catching up with myself on posts, since I was out of commission for three days hammering away on Photoshop for two magazine articles. I finished about forty images, so I will have some left over for probably one more article. I just have to think about what to write about. That’s always the hard part. The images are easy and fun, as long as you don’t hit it for more than about twelve hours at a time. If you do, you get a terrible headache and then you have to drink some beer. Being a free-lancer is a hard life. You get to have fun for twelve solid hours and then drink some beer. I don’t know how I can stand the pressure.

I showed you this Bulb Anemone some time ago. I never was satisfied that I captured the extraordinary colours that I saw with my eyes. Sometimes the combination of the sensor technology in the cameras and the way Photoshop interacts with the images does not reproduce the colours as they were seen. That’s where the work comes in. I worked for about an hour on this one, just to get the colours right. I’ve never seen another anemone this colour. The whole field of them look ghostly white from above. I think that they are sick:

It’s very pretty, even if it doesn’t look real. That’s the way I saw it.

While we’re on things that most people never see, have a look at the head of this Crocodile Fish. I’m too lazy at the moment to look these critters up in my fish book, but someday I will come back and add the taxonomic names and put them in as tags. That gets me a lot of hits on the site from people who are looking for images of specific creatures:

Have a nice dream about that one tonight.

Coral Trout – Coral Cod – these are local names and not to be trusted for identification. They are pretty, anyway:

And, YES, this fish is actually as red as the image makes it look. If you get the sun on it at the right angle, it’ looks like a plastic toy:

You have to click to enlarge to see the bright blue spots on the skin. The Coral Cod above was shot under the wing of the B-25 bomber at Wongat Island. Part of the reason that it looks so bright is that I had to use flash to get the shot. I really prefer to work with natural light, but sometimes there is just not enough of it.

Time for one more shot. This is not a great cuttlefish shot, but it’s the best one that I have, so far. They are actually pretty easy to photograph, since they are so curious and tend to hang around until somebody scares it and it disappears with a puff of black ink left in its wake:

It seem as if I’ve missed more cuttlefish shots than just about any other critter. Either I don’t have my camera, or somebody else sees one and doesn’t let me know. I just hate it when I get back on the boat and somebody says, “Did you see the fantastic __________ ? (Fill in the blank). I just smile and reach for a cigar.

Related posts:

1. Cuttlefish Hunger I Googled "cuttlefish feeding" images and found plenty of examples of the act of feeding, but no others showing a fish sticking out a a cuttlefish's mouth....
2. A Cuttlefish Introduces Something New I have so many fancy new features now that can’t make up my mind where to start. First, we need to do a BLOG ALERT! I’m not happy with the service on the new host and neither is the fellow who is helping me with the technical aspects of all...
3. A Bearded Fish and Some New Features Adding Related Posts and Comment Following will make Madang - Ples Bilong Mi a little easire to use, as will reducing the number of posts on the main page. A bearded fish??...
4. Photgraphing the Photographer Lt. Colonel Simon Watts knows his way around a camera. I seldom get shots of myself, as I'm to busy shooting other people. This one made me quite happy....
5. Have Some Fish – Catching Up Days of solid Photoshop work on images for two magazine articles have kept me from posting. Now I'm going to give you a steady diet of fish for three days....
6. Blurry Fish and Barrel Sponges When you pictures are streaky and blurry, what can you do? Turn them into art! Why throw away valuable pixels? Photoshop yourself to Nirvana....
7. An Impossibly Brilliant Anemone Saturday morning we made the arduous twenty minute journey out to Planet Rock  in Astrolabe Bay.  I shouldn’t moan about the travel time. Most of our dives are within ten minutes of my house. On the Southwest corner at about 23 metres is a large Bulb Anemone (Entacmaea quadricolor).   I...

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 13:59 and is filed under Under the Sea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.