After the first 3 days of workshop we got into the core of it and Alex talked about schooling fish and how to take shots.

We had 4-5 varieties to choose from:

• Batfish
• Surgeonfish
• Barracuda
• Jacks
• Snappers

Detailed information was given in terms of how to best approach the fish depending on their behavior and also about the etiquette in terms of letting other people best positioned taking their shot first.

The surgeon fish are not that photogenic and actually quite messy I tried to take some shots when the current was pumping and they were all aligned close to the bottom at Yolanda however to me this is not that exciting as a shot. Other people got better results but I frankly was not that bothered about Surgeons. Probably as the fish is pretty dark and does not reflect the strobe much. The featured image close to the title shows what I mean.

During this trip the current was not going north to south as usual but there was near to no current at shark reef and current going outward at yolanda corner. This means the snappers that usually sit at the edge of shark reef were not out to play.

We were left with barracuda, batfish and jacks to choose from. On day 4 I only see few giant trevally but not many schooling jacks so had to focus on barracuda and batfish.

Unfortunately the barracuda were far from the reef and a bit too deep and did not really want to entertain chasing them so I tried with the batfish. Obviously there were not only us but also other boats so it was a bit of a competition for fish.

Also you always managed to get someone in the frame or bubbles

So I focused on trying to get the best backgrounds for the pictures to come like in this case.

Also had some fun taking images of the others and the batfish one or two came out pretty good.

It is quite hard to have the discipline to respect rules when you are with other 18 photographer on the boat so the competitions had to be expected and I was not that bothered.

In the evening we headed back to Ras Katy and I borrowed a Nikon D7100 from Nauticam UK. I asked to have a 9″ dome for the split shot and jumped in the water with the idea of just doing that.

This is my best  shot

Personally I do not like split shots where the surface line is very distorted to avoid that you need to make sure your lens is near to rectilinear and it is better to shoot portrait as there is little distortion on that axis. What I wanted to capture in this shot is layers, the reef, water under and over, the boat and sunset colors.

I think it came out pretty good but it is painful to take 100 shots just to get one right and I wish I had some fish in the frame but never mind is good enough like this. The water was not really flat so that was an additional challenge as you can see the wave breaks on the lens creating a little thicker line but overall a good shot.