I managed to squeezed two snorkel sessions in this week to practice with the macrolens. Today it was sunny and still, finally after weeks of bad weather. I returned to the same Rainbow wrack as pictured in the last post and found some other mollusc species but none of the shots worked. (Also, very annoyingly, I had not put the lens on the 1:1 macro setting meaning I had to get out of the water, walk back to the car to dry my hands, remove the camera from the housing, set the lens and then come back…) Because I always (and often) snorkel at the same spot, I know where certain individual seaweeds are. I returned to a Codium plant on which I had seen the solar-powered seaslug Elysia viridis before and found one, 1-cm long individual. I spent most of my time trying to get a decent shot of this slow, cooperative individual. I am getting the hang of it, and played around minimising depth of field to get more light in and to remove distracting background. The backscatter is still a problem. I think having a snoot could work wonders, but I probably should try to practice some more and not fall into the trap of buying new toys. I was too lazy to meticulously tweak photos on Photoshop but used Windows Photos to spice them up, see below for a before and after:

Last Sunday the weather was less good. Instead of lying motionless in front of a sacoglossan , I lay motionless in front of a European cowrie Trivia monacha. I could not position my strobe well, at least, that is my excuse. What is always interesting to see when looking at photos on the computer later are the other, even tinier, organisms photobombing such as this amphipod on the right side of the shell: