The weather is slowly taking a turn for the worse now, so if there is a window to get in the water I am ready for it (I am absolutely dreading the coming half year of wind, rain, darkness and no snorkelling or diving!). Last weekend I took a look underwater in my local seagrass patch in Flushing. The viz was not great at all (as anticipated), so I was looking to do some macrophotography. I clocked plenty of egg masses and indeed some Polycera quadrilineata, which is one of the more common species here in Cornwall but up there with the prettiest! Individuals of this species are often white with yellow stripes and dots, but they can have black lines as well. After taking ages reviewing shots full of backscatter and re-positioning my strobe, the photos started to work out. I noticed one blade of seagrass with two individuals side by side. I suspected they were mating but as they are quite small and my eyesight is getting worse, the anatomical action that was going one only became apparent reviewing the photos back on land. Nudibranchs are simultaneous hermaphrodites and when they mate act both in the female and male role. In the pics below you can see the sexual organs protruding from their right flank. Interesting!
I was on a roll and I pretty much stayed the entire dive on the same square meter, taking photo after photo of the slugs around me. I follow the ‘spray and pray’ routine of photography to make sure at least some of the pics are in perfect focus and without overblown highlights, although the downside of this method is that you have to wade through 200+ pics afterwards. Using the nauticam cmc-1 wetlens I managed to get ‘supermacro’ and was rewarded with some really nice head shots, showing oral flaps, foraging on bryozoans on the seagrass and the slugs generally being very pretty! I am getting more and more into nudibranchs now and hope to find some other species before the sea turns too choppy!
P.S. The previous post was all about low depth of field images; for the photos in this post I took the opposite approach and used the smallest aperture available.
You managed to photoshop those nudibranch in your local area?
if you mean photograph then yes, in Flushing/Falmouth (Cornwall).
That’s absolutely unreal, you’re so lucky. Amazing photographs.