Diver Dave1

Diving the salt pier at Bonaire in May 2024. The end of my final dive of the trip. As we headed back toward shore, two spotted eagles came from different directions directly toward us. When they got maybe 15 feet away, they started circling around each other. They looked similar to two dogs, chasing each other's tail. This went on for what seemed like a long time. Likely a couple of minutes. Then one of them swam away and the other one stayed with us for a while longer. This picture captured the concept of the rays circling.

Recently returned from a week at St Croix. Dove the pier 3 days with Nep2une Divers using a private guide. Their guide service was wonderful. I highly recommend Jenny. It was a family vacation with only me diving so my dives were limited to three days. Water was 80°F and very nice. A fair amount of sand etc in the water so photos often have considerable back scatter. Green turtles were present on all dives, about 6-10 per dive on all dives. Turtles and Southern Sting rays were very relaxed around us and allowed getting within a few feet with no concern. I could have touched turtles and rays that were on/in the sand they were so close at times but I did not touch any of them. Same with feather dusters which did not retract even with my strobes lighting them up. Schools of fish were present but were not as friendly as I found at the salt pier at Bonaire last May. They did not run away but tended to keep a distance that was too far for any really good photos. But there were various fish available for photos as you can see. Link to photos from this trip.  There are 31 photos from this trip shown We came across a male and female stingray performing their mating ritual according to what I find online. Below is a link to the first of 8 photos of the stingrays. The much smaller male bits the wing of the larger female. In the two photos with a diver in them, the female's wing edge is raised which gives the male access to mate with her so those two shots might be of them actually mating. I welcome comments about this from anyone with more knowledge about it as I am certainly no stingray expert. Link to first of 8 photos of StingRays in their mating ritual.  Two Photos with a diver in them perhaps depict the StingRays actually mating.  No way to be certain. This was my first diving trip with my new camera system. I used an Olympus E-M10 Mark IV camera with the 14-42 f3.5-5.6 lens on 2 of the dives. I used the octopus housing. I tried the 30mm macro lens for one dive which tended to hunt and focus too slowly for my taste and photography. I used two Backscatter MF2 strobes. I much prefer my old system, a Nikon D7000 in a Nauticam housing with Inon Z-330 strobes but I moved down in weight and size which was nice. I will continue to use the new system and likely get better with it. We Stayed in a VRBO condo near Christiansted in Condo Row. It had a beach but had small sharp rocks in the sand so shoes were required to walk the beach. No fish in the water by the condo. One non-diver in our group took a guided snorkel tour around the pier and liked it a lot. Cane Bay supplied the guide for that tour. Good to have a phone to give you directions to/from places as there are few road signs. One of our group had a T-Mobile phone and that had good connections in nearly 100% of all locations. It never left let us down no mater where we went. The few times it lost a signal were for short enough distances that it did not matter. Comments are welcome.

That could be it! I have no better suggestions based on the one book I have. My book says that crab is 2-4 inches. i thought it was a bit bigger than that but it is difficult to tell as it was tucked into a spot that prevented getting too close.

TimG, Than you for the suggestion. Diver Dave

I saw this crab near the pier at Fredericksted St Croix in less than 20 ft of water. I am not suggesting it is something unusual. I just do not see a good match in the book I have for an ID. Crab

I have a problem with Lightroom as of today. When I try to open Lightroom, a popup box appears. It says "THIS ACTION CANNOT BE COMPLETED BECAUSE THE OTHER PROGRAM IS BUSY. CHOOSE "SWITCH TO" TO ACTIVE THE BUSY PROGRAM AND CORRECT THE PROBLEM.:" There is a button in the popup that says SWITCH TO and a button that says RETRY. Neither button does anything. I followed the suggestion of an online help page that talked of removing files that have LOCK in their title. I found two of those and put them in the recycle folder. It did not help. I am using an old version of Lightroom from when was single payment to own. I do not have a subscription so Adobe does not provide support for what I have. Anyone have ideas on how to solve this problem? No other programs are running when I try to start Lightroom

Been a diver and photographer for many years. I started U/W photography using a MotorMarine2 using film. That should provide an idea of timing. I use DX format DSLR now but likely going smaller and lighter in the coming months. Visit my website at My Website to see my photos.