In the autumn of 2002 I went to the Red Sea for the first time with a camera.
I was rather surprised by how well some of the pictures came out.
These were taken with an MX-10 without the strobe. OK, actually I did
have a strobe, but the camera wasn't telling it to do any flashing. Fortunately
the flash wasn't essential. Handy though as a thing to hang on to.
Click on pictures to see a full sized version.
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I started off the holiday with black and
white film in the camera. While most of the pictures really didn't work,
some of them did.
Here we have a cloud of Antheas set against a coral background. |
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I like this one because I don't think that
it would have worked using colour film. There's a stark beauty to the
single fish floating above the table coral. The diver just creeping into
shot is annoying. |
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Not sure that this one really works. There's
a nice curve of coral in there, but the surface is too close and over
exposes the rest. Still, it's a learning experience. |
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Clown fish are one of my favourites. There
they are, tiny little things and they'll try to see you off as though
they're the bigger ones. They don't back down. From anyone.
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This isn't a great picture, but
it's a weird thing to have seen. Right at the end of the first day's
diving we saw an Eagle Ray, and swimming with it two long thin fish. As it
swam towards us it spotted the divers and turned away, the two long thin
things turning with it in perfect formation. Everyone came up from the
diving gabbling about seeing the Lancaster at an airshow with two
Spitfires hanging under the wings. I wondered for a while if they were
ramoras, hanging on, but the picture plainly shows they were
separate. |
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Just a nice image of a shallow pinnacle and
the fish that live around it. |
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Some coral. It's not all dead. |
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A blue triggerfish with wonderful trailing
fronds for a tail. |
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There's a crocodile fish in this photo. I've
shown it to people at work who've not been able to see the actual fish.
(It's in the middle of picture) |
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A blue spotted stingray. Being very good and
not swimming off until everyone had had a chance to gawp at it. |
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Some parrot fish willfully chewing on the
coral. Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch they go, chewing it all up. It's a wonder
there's any reef left. |
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A lionfish.
You see them, you take the photo, you realise that while they are pretty
enough, they're common as dirt... |
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Some more lionfish. This time lurking about
in an overhang. They do that.
That's enough lionfish... |
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A gorgonian coral. |
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Some more of my favourite fish, this time
glassfish.
It's the flocking that gets me. There they are, separate, but swimming as
a group. |
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More glassfish, this time with a diver.
The diver is called Del, and he was then a trainee divemaster. I had to
wait an agonisingly long time to get a shot of him not actually exhaling. |
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A swirl of glassfish and antheas with a
great lump of orange coral making the whole shot come out dark. I don't
remember ever seeing sea that colour. |
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A single angelfish.
This is an odder photo than it seems - I don't remember ever seeing a
single angelfish before or since. |
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Normally angelfish are like this - swimming
about in pairs. |
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I expect I should know what kind of fish
this is. They're all over the place and quite pretty. I like the way it's
lit up brightly against a dull background. |
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More of that yellow coral darkening the sea
around it. The wonders of flash photography. |
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A spotty fish of some kind trying to hide
from the camera. Not sure what it is. I thought at the time it was a
wrasse, but it's not. |
