Lembeh Strait Night Dive

Here's a montage of night dive footage from the Lembeh Strait, shot at Jahir, Nudi Falls and "Muka" in front of Two Fish Divers' resort.

[googlevideo]423990407960852886[/googlevideo]

If you're interested in the names of the marine life the version on Google Video has closed captions. You can also download a nice clear 480px wide version there too. There is also a Windows Media version on my Lembeh Strait page.

p.s. Couldn't resist the action replay where the pygmy seahorse gets a wormy thing full in the face. Apologies to the critter in question. Poor little thing has enough to contend with strobes and lights all day long without that.

Nick that was cool. Poor little chap...

You have some very nice material there...

Hey Nick,

I can see why you were so stoked when you got back from this trip. You have some very nice sequences there. Nice lighting, steady camera handling and varied subjects. Shame about the little guy getting twatted out by an errant wormy thing (biology not my strong point) but it looked great in slo mo, poor chap.

Good work mate, keep it up.

Mark.

P.S I'm planning to hit northern Sulawesi next year for about 6 weeks to get my fix of macro filming. We get spoilt here in Palau for the big stuff but it can actually get boring day in day out watching the same stuff swim by. Any pointers or reccommendations for places to stay / dive?

Nick, loved the pygmy shot but how did you get those banded pipe fish to pose for you. I find them difficult to frame and shoot because they are usually all over the place.

I'm fully convinced that any shooter who can't get the shots of their life in Lembah Strates has no business shooting as the place is crawling with great clips for the taking.

Great job Nick, and I liked the music.

Steve B)

Thanks for sharing Nick - I really enjoyed it - how many dives did it take to get all those critters at night? The frogfish fishing was my favorite part!

Aloha

Bryce

Hey Nick;

Very nice stuff - agree with all the other comments!

Thanks for sharing, made my evening.

Jack

Nick.

Absolutely wonderfull !

Like it very much, excelent work.

Like the music also, good choice.

Thanks for all the kind words everyone.

Bryce I did 5 night dives all together. 2 on the house reef, 2 at Jahir and one at Nudi Falls.

Steve I have no idea about how the pipefish stayed still. I probably just had them trapped in a corner. I do have my lights very dim when I'm shooting at night and that may well have helped in not freaking them out.

Mark, I stayed with the English-run Two Fish Divers at both Bunaken and Lembeh. I would recommend them and the dive guides are excellent. Their Lembeh resort is small and basic and in its infancy but it has a charm about it. There are fancier operators with hot showers etc. in both locations but probably more expensive.

Personally I enjoyed Lembeh a lot more than Bunaken. This may be because the Bunaken diving is more similar to what I've got over here in Thailand. If you're into weird critters then Lembeh's just great. Over here in Thailand/Burma we'd all get in a lather about a frogfish or a ghost pipefish or whatever and over there this stuff and loads more is just commonplace.

Also I found the video to be a challenge at Bunaken. It's all wall diving and most of the time at say 20m it was quite shady and dark, plus a fair amount of dirt in the water. It was difficult to get video looking as good as it does from here. I had a great baby whale shark though. I'll post a clip of it but I need to clean up the footage first as there was dirt on the lens. Personally I got more out of the sites like Tiwoko near Manado on the Sulawesi mainland than Bunaken and Manado Tua islands.

Apart from Bunaken and Lembeh you might consider a trip to Bangka Island. Didn't go there myself but it's not so far away and they organise trips to it from time to time.

One other tip... take warm gear, hood etc.. Some of our dives were upto 100 minutes long (!!!) and typically I was underwater 5 hours a day! So even at 27 degrees I was freezing by the end of them and on the ride home.

Mark, are you going to take flat port and diopters or are you going to use your SWP44?

Awesome footage.....

The visiblity in the Philipines was around 50 feet....not really all that great for wide angle stuff, but I was into macro anyway.....

Lembeh Straights is on my short list, but are there any areas that are not dark mucky sand so I can get soem wide angle reef shots?

My Philipines video is rather one dimensional as there are no reef shots.....

Did you see any ornate ghost pipefish or flambouyant cuttlefish?

When I did the night macro stuff in the Philipines I had my Phenom and dual 35-50 HID's turned down to the 35 watt setting and it was like a huge floodlight....all the divers just followed me around as their diving lights gave them tunnel vision. Like your footage, the plankton was going ape and banging into everything.

Hi Nick,

Sorry for the late response. I've heard of Two Fish Divers so I'll contact them nearer the time. Maybe by then they will have the hot showers sorted. I don't mind the lower end of the comfort scale, 12 years ex military mate so I could sleep on a park bench with a monsoon if needed. Plus I wanna be able to put most of the budget into diving and getting the gear there anyway, not looking forward to that. This stuff weighs a ton!!!

I will take the SWP44 but only for establishing reef shots etc. I understand the conditions can be lower viz at times but thats just the local habitat for you. Sick and tired of 200ft viz anyway .....

For the main work I'm planning to spend upwards of three weeks there documenting all the weird critters. I will probably take a few diopters but will also be spending a lot of time between now and then looking for a decent achromatic diopter arrangement as I really don't want to get into vignetting issues. I have a Raynox 11x coming soon so will post results with that. That puppy will basically be used for the extreme stuff, if I'm lucky I'll also get a pygmy seahorse getting clocked by a wormy thing but the difference being that I'll be able to get close for the eyes rolling to the back of the sockets shot followed up by the look of "What the ***k was that!! (is HECK a swearword)??

I'm now in the process of getting some new lighting sorted out. For any of you going to DEMA I suggest you check out Nuytco's "Diver HMI" option. The company that bought us the Newtsuit is now looking to get into portable lighting systems for photographers and video productions etc. I recently got the specs from them. No price on the units yet (not cheap unfortunately) but they certainly look to be the muts nuts based on the recieved info thus far. Due for release after DEMA. Any reports on these would be great by those of you looking at heading to the show.

Cheers,

Mark.

P.S

Yes I'll be taking Flat ports and all the macro filming lenses I can get my hands on between now and then.

Cheers,

Mark.

Mark,

Go to diverslodge in Lembeh http://www.diving-on-sulawesi.com/gb/index.php i been there several times and send menny people over there!

The accomodation is GOOD but no big Luxery and it is realy personal the owner Rob is a Dutch guy living there for 15 years and his guide's are imazing.

This resort that is on Lembeh island is on the corner of Lembeh and when the weather is good you can dive also the other site (not Lembeh strait) and this is a place nobody dives! all corals etc...

Lembeh Straights is on my short list, but are there any areas that are not dark mucky sand so I can get soem wide angle reef shots?

I did a site towards north end of the strait called Angels Window. The sand there is paler and you could get some wider reef shots. Here and there in the middle of the strait you get amazing hard coral reefs in the shallows. They have a unique atmosphere, not like your average blue water reefs. If you want blue water stuff then combine 2 or 3 days at Manado/Bunaken into the same trip.

Did you see any ornate ghost pipefish or flambouyant cuttlefish?

Yes, a couple of ornate ghost pipefish (and several in Manado/Bunaken). Sadly no flamboyant cuttlefish at either location.

When I did the night macro stuff in the Philipines I had my Phenom and dual 35-50 HID's turned down to the 35 watt setting and it was like a huge floodlight....all the divers just followed me around as their diving lights gave them tunnel vision. Like your footage, the plankton was going ape and banging into everything.

Dave I'd really consider making some dark filters for those lights. Maybe you could take them off when you're in "search mode" and put them back on when you settle in to shoot something. The marine life will be much more approachable and behave more naturally.

... if I'm lucky I'll also get a pygmy seahorse getting clocked by a wormy thing but the difference being that I'll be able to get close for the eyes rolling to the back of the sockets shot followed up by the look of "What the ***k was that!! (is HECK a swearword)??

Mark how do you plan to deal with camera steadiness? I had to summon everything I could to get that pygmy seahorse shot, including steadyshot and a load of unusable shaky takes. I was playing with the steadyshot settings on my new Z1 last night and the "hard" setting makes a huge difference over turning steadyshot off. It might be an option for super-macro dives but I'm wondering how big a hit the image quality takes . People are always mentioning tripods but personally I can't see that really coming together with any real control using these big housings.

Hey Nick, that was wonderful! I really liked your editing rhythm. Felt right on and worked really well with the material. Well-framed subjects and, as has already been commented upon, good steady hand in the footage you show! In Lembeh, I used a short stick (about 10 inches long) to plant very carefully in the muck and stablized that way, but still got more camera movement than I cared for. You did a great job. Makes me want to go back!

Thank you for sharing!

Mary Lynn

Hi Nick,

Stability is always an issue and is also something that brings out the creativeness insofar as the ability to adapt your equipment to the shooting environment. Standard tripods will obviously not work well with the newer gamme of large and bulky housings due to the limited size of their attchment point to the housing. If you take a look at the report I made for the Gates housing you'll see that they have made a nice foot for the housing when using the Fathoms 120. At each corner of this foot there is a protective rubber resting pad which has been screwed in place using a bolt with an allen head. I intend to remove the rubber rest and adapt an articulated flash arm or something similar to each of the four corners of this foot. That will allow me to disperse the weight evenly, bear in mind too the macro arrangement for this unit will be a lot lighter than the WA arrangement. I am also looking to put like ski pole feet on the end of the arms to ensure they don't sink when filming on sand. I imagine that most of the critters are gonna be either on or close to the ground so I will be looking to create the legs to be able to extend to a max of about 18 inches. After that I guess it will come down to resting on rocks, no coral, sand or plain old arm work.

Cheers,

Mark.

Hey Mark,

That sounds like a great set-up for stablizing shots in muck. The ski pole idea is great!

ML

Mark I fear you might put a lot of effort into those support arrangements and then end up not using them. I found the best way to shoot most of these bottom-dwelling weirdos was to get the camera as low as possible. I think seeing the horizon behind the subject if possible makes for a nice shot with "depth" and "setting". More "cinematic" if you like. So my general routine was to set up for the shot then literally wiggle the whole housing to bed it down into the muck and get a nice steady platform. But you've got to be gentle otherwise you'll be waiting 2 minutes for the silt cloud to disperse. The other great thing with that fine dark silty sand is that you can pan quite steadily on it if the subject starts moving. It's almost like a fluid head on a tripod (doesn't work for pygmy seahorses up in the fan corals though!). On the flipside I sometimes found myself literally sliding down a slope during a shot if the slope was steep (e.g. Tulamben).

Hi Nick and Mary Lynn,

The stabalising arrangement is not set in stone but thats what I'm thinking about doing. Also thinking about having them arranged like the stabilizers on a large earth moving crane etc. You know, with those four extended arms that come out and then a hydraulic leg is forced downward to take the weight of the vehicle and spread the weight?

Needless to say I am not gonna be building any kind of hydraulic system but the four legs attached with a quick release clamp can then be independantly set at whatever length to take into consideration any uneven ground etc. I' have some very capable guys here who work in our machine shop so I'll be looking at getting something down soon. I'll post pics etc when thats ready.

Mary Lynn, did you get my response to your last email regarding "Tribute"?

Cheers all,

Mark.