I’m working like a dog today, the day after American Thanksgiving to get a new calendar put together, hopefully to make a few bucks selling it. Before I go back to the Publishing Department to use their equipment, let me show you a few of the less ordinary images from my library. I don’t have a theme today. My mind is more or less blank. That seems to be happening a lot lately.

This is a spooky image of the interior of The Henry Leith,  a 34 metre cargo ship that was scuttled off Wongat Island  for an artificial reef and dive attraction:

Creepy, eh? The image seemed to be more interesting in monochrome. Simon and Garfunkel were wrong. Not everything  looks worse in black and white.

This lump-of-coal thingie is an Egg Cowrie (Ovula ovum).  It’s quite rare to see them. They always seem to favour this Leather Coral (Sarcophyton sp.)  as a resting place:

They make horrible photographic subjects. The mantle is as black as the inside of a witch’s psyche. I’ve often wondered if it looks different to fish. Maybe it reflects some portion of the light spectrum that our eyes can’t see. You can barely see some of the snow white shell peeking through the seam where the two halves of the mantle meet.

This, I think, is a very juvenile specimen of the coral Heliofungia actiniformis:I put it in here because, to us divers, it is a cute little baby thing. We bubble stupid stuff to each other like, “Awwww, look at the sweet little baby Heliofungia actiniformis.  Coochie coochie coo.”

It’s true.

Speaking of babies, these will grow up to have very big teeth, indeed:

They are juvenile barracuda. I don’t know what species. It’s interesting that the juvenile form here looks like a perfectly miniaturised copy of the adult.

Okay, back to work on the calendar.

Related posts:

1. I Bet That You Have Never Eaten One of These Things that are exceedingly unlikely to find their way to your dinner plate during the holiday season - unless you're coming to my house....
2. Leper Island – No Lepers – Never Were It doesn't take much immagination to guess where the name Leper Island came from. You'd probably be wrong. In fact, you'd almost certainly be wrong....
3. To Flash or Not To Flash – That Is the Question When shooting underwater, the big question is, "Should it look real, or should it look colourful?" It usually comes down to whether you use flash or not....
4. Hold Your Nose – We’re Going Under! We’re going diving, but first I have to get this out of my brain:  How smart can Google be? I Googled this (without the quotes) “how many people are killed by falling coconuts each year?” Out of the ten hits at the top, nearly all claimed that 150 are killed...
5. Fooling Fish on the Henry Leith Fooling fish into posing for photos on The Henry Leith at Wongat Island near Madang, Papua New Guinea. Jan Messersmith - author, photographer, Divemaster....
6. Sky – Water I know that I show probably more sunrises than any other web site on the planet. No, wait, I’m sure there must be a “Just Sunrises” web site somewhere. Uh, strike that. I just Googled “just sunrises” and didn’t find any sites with that title. I did find a nice...
7. Reef Scenes – The Magic Kingdom Capturing underwater scenes in life-like colours is fussy. I'm going for "what you get is what you saw". Photoshop is my twelve-pound sledgehammer for this job....

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 08:21 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.