Black faced blennies in action :)

Hi all,

Under Swanage pier in the UK today there were several black faced blennies which are usually quite uncommon here. I found one male who found a female and have a look what happened! Apologies for the scatter, 1 meter vis at best and they were on a vertical incline so I was upside down breathing salt water most of the time, thank goodness for the INON viewfinder

Before he saw the female, he was relaxed and pale of face

as soon as he saw the female, his face went bright blue!!

with a nice blue face, he was ready for courting

who could resist such blue-faced charms

Admittedly not as pretty as mandarin fish but equally fascinating....

awesome encounter and lovely pics. i don't find the backscatter bad at all, a decent bit in the top photo but its very even and natural looking, blends with the background bokeh.

a lot of divers either completely miss or don't appreciate a display of behavior like this (not us photogs though) which makes for a really enchanting dive. cheers,

chris

Great work partner!

Nature at it's best

Cheers

Karel

Wish you used tinypic instead of flickr then I wouldnt have to wait until tonight to see them

Hi Alex,

Lovely behavioral series! Somehow the fact that you manged to get the whole series in what were obviously challenging conditions, makes you ignore the backscatter!

You guys are cleaning up on the South Coast!

Adam

Really cool series, I have photographed them doing this in July (on the block underneath the jumping in point half way down the pier), good to learn they spawn several times during the season.

I don't find the backscatter a problem in any of them. Being behaviour shots, rather than artistic images, I think they are best to be natural.

Alex

Hey, you just told me on facebook that the viz was "really quite good" and here it is "1m viz at best"!

Fab sequence!

You call that scatter?!

The vis was actually quite good until I stirred it up trying to take shots of these blennies! Everywhere else was 5m apart from where I was

For anyone interested, I took these with the 60mm macro on the Canon 7D using the Zen 100mm optical glass dome (because I didn't have the right length macro port).

Although the pictures came out OK, my first impression was that I'd have preferred a macro port mostly because I couldn't use the wet diopter for added magnification. I'd definitely take a macro port with me next time.

Went back today but the loving was over, he was all alone:

Saw a nice dragonet though:

and a very large edible crab who had just found his dinner, fish today, it's Friday

Fantastic Alex

Did you take the crab for your dinner after it had finnished eating...?

No, call me soft but I just can't bring myself to take them from their watery homes! Pre-prepared as Thai style crab cakes, now you're talking!