Tag Archives: uwphoto

Blue Jellyfish

Posted on by under cnidarians, fisheye, jellies, photography, wide angle

It is jellyfish season again and the Blue Jellyfish (Cyanea lamarckii) is probably the commonest species in Cornwall. Supposedly they sting but I have never noticed. Rather than taking a ‘true’ photo with an exposed background, I usually opt to not expose the background and light up the jellyfish with strobes. As these jellyfish are quite small (the ones I see are 5-12 cm in diameter; they can grow larger though) this is hard with the jelly up against the mini-dome (using a 8mm fisheye lens). The Microsoft Photo app let’s me get rid of the backscatter in the background but this does not always work as it tends to remove tentacles as well. (I cannot really see it on my computer screen but did notice on my phone: the bottom two pics have the background replaced but the top one hasn’t and so is a bit less clean.) Anyway, these animals are beautiful and quite otherworldly!

life on a chain

Posted on by under buoys, crustaceans, molluscs

The rain has been hammering down and I am in accute underwater withdrawal… Just a bit of the ole bloggin then! These are some pictures from April, when the phytoplankton had not kicked in and the water was still quite blue. Out of curiousity I swam out to the marker buoys off Castle Beach in Falmouth to see if there was anything interesting growing on them. There was! Lots of mussels, including on the chain going down to the bottom (10ish meters deep). I took my fisheye lens and after much adjusting of strobes (holding the housing sideways for portrait mode, and also up, meaning that the lower strobe needed to be pulled back) I got the nice shot above. Mussels are not a favourite of underwaterphotographers (this is an understatement!) but they are beautiful upclose, the white mantle contrasting with the blueish black shell.

A few days later I returned with my probe lens, as i thought this would offer an original perspective. It was a tricky thing to do as this lens lets in very little light. The difference between foreground and background seems slightly off as well! These photos show that the mussels were crawling with the tubedwelling amphipod Jassa marmorata, a prominent fouling species. I planned to return to try again a few days later, but the chains had been replaced by ‘fresh’ ones, bad luck! I will go back to have a look at them as soon as the weather allows it.

P.S. there are two older posts tagged with ‘buoys‘.

some good’uns

Posted on by under anemones, echinoderms, photography, wide angle

l have not made much progress sorting through recent seaweed pics but it is easy to post two recent photos that came out well. Above the Spiny starfish Marthasterias glacialis. This seastar can grow up to 70 cm across, but on the shore you generally do not find them much larger than 20 cm. It occurs from Northern Norway down to West Africa. Below a patch of Snakelocks anemones Anemonia viridis, probably originating via binary fission. The most common anemone in the rockpools here, around half are this tan colour, the other half is green with purple tips. No one knows why. (And interestingly, it is not the only anemone species that shows two colour variants, beadlets are red or green, plumose anemones white or orange). Although the water was 9C, with the sun on the white sand it looks pretty tropical to me, a clownfish would not have been out of place! (I took a photo of this same patch in March but that one was not nearly as good.)