Boys and Baitfish
2004—Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea
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Shot with a Nikon D100 and Nikkor DX 10.5 fisheye lens in a Subal ND10 |
On my first trip with a digital SLR outfit, I had the luck to be on a liveaboard in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea, with only two other divers! It was as though we had our own private yacht, and we took full advantage. While steaming toward a popular dive site where we intended to spend a couple days, we passed close by a village wharf, where dozens of locals were fishing with hand lines for whatever lurked below. We decided to see what it was they were trying to catch. A closer look revealed a huge school of thousands of baitfish (likely sardines) that were congregating under the wharf, between the surface and the ocean floor 20 feet below. The area appeared to be the village's garbage dump (not pretty, or safe, for that matter).
Nonetheless, we decided to dive in to get a closer look, and spent about 90 minutes dodging broken glass, sharp metal debris, and spiny urchins from below, and a phalanx of fishing hooks from above. Again, it wasn't the most beautiful dive in the world, but the swirling mass of baitfish was mesmerizing. It appeared at times like an organism unto itself, undulating and rotating, rather than thousands of individual fish that formed the school. I had envisioned the above shot multiple times during the dive, shooting almost directly up toward the surface, but couldn't manage to get the right composition without my exhalation bubbles getting in the frame. Finally, I was able to hold my breath long enough for the bubbles to clear, and was lucky enough that the school left a perfect opening around the pier support through which you can see two boys peering down, backlit by the afternoon sun. The fisheye lens allowed me to get very close to the school while keeping the entire scene in the frame, and in focus, because of its tremendous depth of field, especially at f11. Later in the year, this image won First Prize for Color Prints at the World Festival of Underwater Images at Antibes, France.