Philippines, Southern Visayas route with the Philippine Siren

daveco2 wrote:

1cm? Truly incredible. And the subjects were still enough.

Well, nudibranchs don't move very fast, and the shrimp was content to sit still in front of its burrow.

What’s that ominous thing behind the crab?

Just some coral, I think. I actually though it was a crinoid at the time, but looking over the photo, it definitely isn't one. Maybe an anemone, not sure. Here is an uncropped shot, with a little shrimp doing some photobombing:

Are the subjects plentiful?

It was at Coral Cove, Puerto Galera. In that specific spot, we found half a dozen large (10cm+) sea horses, this candy crab, a bunch of various small shrimp and a few nudibranches within maybe 10-15 minutes.

Do you have enough time to get these shots, diving in a group?

I was actually doing a PADI Rescue Diver course, and Puerto Galera is slow right now, so it was just me, instructor, and another guy from dive shop who is doing the same course - we were doing the exercises on each other, but the instructor padded them out with regular dives either before or after the training. Setting up the diopter shots took a couple minutes though, and I had to chase them down afterwards. I was lucky it was in a sandy area where I could brace myself on the bottom, or it would've been a lot harder.

Once set up, can you rely on strobe placement?

Depends on the surroundings. In general, shooting macro, I can keep the strobes at the sides of the camera, angled in a bit or facing straight forward. With supermacro (diopter) I move them forward and angle them in more; otherwise the port will shadow the subject as the working distance is only a few centimeters. Sometimes stuff gets in the way and I have to maneuver them clear of obstacles. They are mounted on twin 8" arms (300g carbon fiber floats with macro setup, normal arms with dome), but I very rarely use the full spread - I have a rope lanyard with a bolt snap at each end bridging the two joints on top, which acts as a carrying handle/shoulder strap, so I generally just maneuver the outer segments. One exception was the trevally school shot in the original post - I was deep (about 25m) so there wasn't much light, but there was a lot of plankton in the water, enough that I could tell I was getting backscatter right away, so I unclipped one end of the lanyard and moved the strobes as far as they would go. Being ST-100s triggered off the camera flash in TTL, they don't have much power, but at that depth and visibility there wasn't much natural light to fight against, so I was able to get close enough to the school to light a part of it. Really with I had the Retras on that dive.