Tony Wu's Underwater Photography Blog

Posts Tagged super-macro

Dinah’s Goby

Sun, Jun 26th, 2011 | Equipment, Technique, Marine Life, Places, Adventures 6 Comments

We’ve just arrived back in Alotau, after another terrific journey of exploration aboard Golden Dawn, which took us first to the Cape Vogel area, over to Goodenough Island, around Fergusson Island, through the strait between Fergusson and Normanby, and finally to the fantastic reefs around Nuakata Island.

Bob, Wen-Tsae and Eric have just left for the airport. The rest of us will be catching flights in the next day or two.

Without a doubt, one of the highlights of this trip for me was having the opportunity to see and photograph Lubricogobius dinah, an irresistibly cute yellow-and-white goby:

Pair of Dinah’s gobies (Lubricogobius dinah) with their beer-bottle home,
at Observation Point in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea

I can’t remember the exact circumstances under which I first came across a reference to these fish, but I’m pretty sure it was over a decade ago. What I do recall however, is my gut reaction at the time, which was something like: “I like!”, with a big, silly grin plastered across my face.

Anyway, it’s a good thing I have an obsessive personality, because it’s taken me this long to find and photograph a pair.

This fish is named after Bob’s wife Dinah, who is as nice a person as these fish are cute. When we reached a dive site known as Observation Point on Normanby Island, Bob took me down to look for several beer bottles he placed here in the past, where these gobies often take up residence.

Given how long I’ve waited to see these fish, I was anxious…anxious that we might not find any gobies, and if we did, that I might screw up the photos, as these fish are small, skittish, and live down at 30 metres or more. They have a tendency duck inside their homes at the slightest disturbance. When you’re down deep, there’s not a lot of time to twiddle thumbs while you wait.

The first bottle we checked was a blank, but the second was occupied. Bob left me at 30 metres, where I spent 40 minutes approaching fish.

If you’re a diver, you’re probably thinking, “40 minutes at 30 metres? That’s serious deco time.”

It was.

Actually, I was on a rebreather, which was a big help…first because it helped to minimise sounds associated with exhalation, and second, because it allowed me to maintain a high PPO2 and stay down longer with minimal nitrogen saturation. (Almost sounds like I know what I’m talking about, doesn’t it?). Anyway, the upshot is that without the rebreather, I would’ve been significantly more time-restricted and nitrogen-loaded, and the sound of bubbles may have kept the fish from growing comfortable with my presence.

Even with the relative silence of a rebreather, the gobies ducked into the bottle as soon as I approached, but after I waited 10 to 15 minutes, they came out again. Little-by-little I closed the distance, until I was near enough to nail a few images like this:

Super-macro shot of Dinah’s goby (Lubricogobius dinah)

[Behavioural note: When the gobies eventually grew accustomed to my presence, one (always the same individual) stayed in the bottle all the time. The other fish swam outside, often perching atop the bottle entrance, but more often, hovering five to 10 centimetres above the bottle, swimming in a slightly twitchy fashion, reminiscent of how dart gobies move. I’m not sure if anyone else has ever seen this behaviour before, as the goby only started swimming above the bottle when it seemed completely at ease with me.]

When preparing for the dive, I knew that this would be a one-time opportunity. If we found the fish, I’d have one chance, and one chance only, as we were planning to move on to another site after the dive.

With a bit of deliberation, I chose to use a super-macro set-up, because I wasn’t sure how close the gobies would allow me to approach. I figured that with a 3x teleconverter + 100mm macro lens + Canon 5D Mark II camera, I would be able to maximise image magnification, even at a considerable distance. Of course, with the loss of light from the teleconverter and the inherently dark conditions at 30m in muck, it was nearly impossible to see.

I took a Sola 600 light down with me and used the red focusing light. Fortunately, that provided sufficient illumination for me to focus manually, and the red light didn’t seem to bother the fish.

So…after 40 minutes of lying at 30 metres on the bottom of the ocean, crawling centimetre by centimetre, using a KISS rebreather, wielding a super-macro lens set-up and aiming with a Sola 600 light, I slam-dunked a series of shots I’ve been pursuing for more than 10 years…thanks, of course, to Bob’s sage advice and impeccable fish-spotting talent.

(Disclosure: Sola 600 provided by Scubacam and Light and Motion)

Go Go Goby

Mon, May 16th, 2011 | Marine Life 2 Comments

A few super-macro goby images that I shot at approximately 3x life-size magnification in Kokopo, New Ireland in Papua New Guinea, at between seven and ten metres depth.

I think this beautiful sparkly fish with fins flared is a species of Vanderhorstia:

Possibly an undescribed shrimp goby species of the genus Vanderhorstia?

The next two…no clue, but I caught the one below just when it did a “gulp”, which most gobies seem to do from time to time:

Goby with mouth open

And this one looks like it’s all made up to go out and paint the town red, or perhaps blue and gold (Update: Looks like the one below may be Vanderhorstia ornatissima, thank you Tsutaki-san!):

Close-up of some sort of goby

Taking photos of little fish like this requires spending a lot of time with them, and being patient. If you’re completely still and wait long enough, they’ll sometimes allow to you to approach within centimetres. Sometimes.

Please let me know if you can help me ID these fish!

(Update: It seems like they’re probably all Vanderhorstia species.)

Article: The Photographic Eye

Tue, Jun 9th, 2009 | Articles, Equipment, Technique 2 Comments

goby Here’s another instalment (756kB PDF file) of The Photographic Eye column from Wetpixel Quarterly.

The subject of this particular column is the preparation that went into taking a super close-up photo of a yawning goby in mid-water…not preparation as in setting up of equipment, but preparation in the context of acquiring the equipment, knowledge and skills to nail the shot.

There are a lot of references to Star Wars…so in advance…yes, I’m a Sci-Fi geek.

Using Teleconverters for Macro

Fri, Jan 9th, 2009 | Equipment, Technique, Featured 13 Comments

I received a question asking whether it’s ok to use a teleconverter (TC) to take super-macro photos. Actually, I get asked about this often, so I figured it’s worth writing a bit about this topic.

Using TCs is no big mystery. Essentially, you’re using an additional lens to increase the magnification of your primary lens…sort of a lens on top of a lens.

There are pros and cons to this arrangement. On the positive side, you can achieve greater magnification than without using them, which means you can shoot smaller subjects, or reveal greater detail of any given subject.

On the negative side, you’re adding more glass, which means a drop in quality and quantity of light transmission, the extent of which depends on the quality of the particular TC you’re using. Colour, sharpness and such do suffer, but it’s manageable and worth the trade off if you’re going for shots that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.

In practical terms, you can achieve great macro results with teleconverters…just keep a few things in mind.

First, use the best primary lens you can. For my Canon system, this usually means the 100mm f2.8 macro lens. The equivalent in the Nikon world is the 105mm f2.8 macro lens.

Next, you’ll need to use manual focus in most cases (getting the right gears and ports may be a challenge). Teleconverters reduce the amount of light reaching your camera’s sensor, which makes autofocus relatively more difficult, especially if you’re in low light to begin with, at high magnification, and/ or shooting something with low contrast (quite often, you have to contend with all three of these things at the same time). If you rely on AF, it’ll probably be slow, and may end up “hunting” before locking focus.

Second, hike your ISO up a bit to help your strobes out. Third, open up your aperture to maximise light transmission. Normally, I start with f5.6 on-camera reading and close down from there, depending on the ambient conditions and desired result.

Finally, camera shake can be a real problem, so ideally, you should be in a situation where you are stable. Shooting super-macro while hovering in mid-water simply isn’t feasible. And use a relatively high shutter speed. For example, 1/160-1/200 is the strobe sync speed for my Canon EOS 5D.

To illustrate, here are a few sample images I took using teleconverters (all with Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens plus various TCs):

The challenge here was low light, low visibility, and a frickin’ small nudibranch that wouldn’t stop moving.

I adore gobies. The primary challenge is spending sufficient time with the fish to become friends.

If you get really good with manual focus, you can learn to focus on rapidly moving subjects too, though you’ll have to expect a higher miss-ratio than for more cooperative targets.