Wetpixel whale sharks 2013

Hi John,

I was shooting my 7D in the Nauticam housing using the Tokina 10-17mm rolled to 10mm 95% of the time. There is so much stuff in the water that I felt like I wanted to limit the water column as much as possible. Especially if you follow Adam around. (See above) Others were more comfortable at 17mm when shooting the crop frame. Guess it depends on the look you're after and how comfortable you are getting close to the sharks without touching them. I used my little Zen dome for most of the trip (easier to free dive with) and put my big dome on for two days of shooting splits. I was shooting manual exposure, hi speed continuous the vast majority of the time.

The sun angle you shoot is probably more important than the lens. Shooting across the sun provided me the best opportunity to limit backscatter. I had the best luck down or across the sun early in the morning as you'd expect.

I spent about 5 hours in the water every day in my dive skin and was very comfortable. Take big huge cards with you. One unforgetable morning I shot 500 images in less than two hours while being constantly circled by whale sharks and dancing mantas. That will just about fill a 16GB card on the 7D.

My Isla Mujeres set on Flickr is still in progress but a few images are up here.

Cheers,

Steve

I shot Canon 5D3 in a Nauticam housing with the big Zen dome, with the Tokina 17mm/3.5 and the Canon 15mm fisheye. Also shot GoPro HERO3 Black in quadcopter, and underwater.

Day one of trip two of the Wetpixel Isla Mujeres Whale Shark Expedition... and my first time seeing whale sharks. What a great first day!!!

Great trip report - I second Adam, this place is amazing!

Thanks for listing your equipment guys... great shots! Lovely to see all the Manta's too -- when I was there it was just the poor lonely bus-sized Whale Sharks

Good to see Rogelio and Juan are still shepherding lots of snorkelers off the Lilly M. into the Whale Shark Rodeo.

Pictures from today! The second group is here, including a bunch of Wetpixel members, and we've had two great days on the water. The wind let up today, which gave us some calm water to work with. In addition to whale sharks, we saw and photographed a couple manta rays, squadrons of mobula rays, and a couple sailfish.

And... underwater:

Returning to the equipment question for a minute:

I was lucky enough to be using a Canon EOS-6D in a Nauticam housing and a Canon 8-15mm lens. I also used a Zen 4" dome with a removable sun shade to allow for circular fisheye shots.

I also used a Canon PowerShot G15 in a Canon housing with Inon wide-angle wet lenses. (image by Stephanie Hannon)

Lastly, I used an iPhone 5 in an iDive housing with a wide angle adaptor!

Adam

Hello, I wanted to thank all of you for the amazing week I had! What a unique experience! This was my first official underwater 'big animal' expedition and....... I'm still buzzing from it! These images and emotions will be with me for the rest of my life!! So again thank you and I hope to see you all out there in the near future.

Cheers

Barry

........ more mantas:)

la bouteille!

non stop!

Had a another fantastic day. We are so very lucky to have such good weather and an abundance of whale sharks. Also some mantas today and some Mobelias.

see attached photo

Just a quick comment to say that I am loving this thread! :-)

You Wetpixel guys and gals had a great couple weeks down here. Lots of shark and manta action. Just so photographers are aware, all photos are done with ambient light and no strobes are allowed. There was one guy with a nauticam housing and big strobe arms plodding through the water, flashing everything that he could swim near to and obviously did not care about the rules. He was not with the Wetpixel group but came over from Cozumel. Maybe he should brush up on ambient light photography besides its much easier to push around a DSLR rig without strobes dangling off it.. Whale shark season ends around mid september .

I saw that guy! He was going nuts with the flashing, which probably wasn't doing all that much in the strong sunlight. We had a really great trip.

Just to keep everyone's appetite's whetted, here is another image:

There is a gallery of images from this year's trip on Wetpixel's Full Frame feature too

I can't wait for next year!

Adam