Raja Empat images

I've finally got shots from trip to Raja Empat islands over Dec-Jan up on my website. Comments, criticisms, etc. very welcome. I'm particularly interested in hearing how colors look to others. For image work, I use an IBM Thinkpad T40, with an LCD screen. Paul Osmond says my colors are all off, and he may be right.

The reefs and islands of Raja Empat are truly spectacular, and quite pristine, though at the end of the day I think I still prefer Komodo. Amazing corals, lots of fishes. A lot more things that I wasn't able to ID than usual, but this is supposed to be the ultimate location in terms of biodiversity, so perhaps that's not surprising. Visibility was not so great, as expected, but I mostly shot wide-angle anyway (and threw a lot away). I also experimented with over-unders for the first time on this trip, including some shots in mangroves, which was interesting and, I think, rewarding.

The site is: http://www.tabula-international.com/ Click on the Raja Empat thumbnail.

Here are a few shots I liked....

(Your basic Raja Empat seafan)

(Schooling scads under a jetty at a pearl farm, afternoon light.)

(Soft coral and barrel sponge underneath mangroves)

(UNID juvenile file fish)

(UNID holothurian)

(Featherduster worm)

Coral shrimpfish

(Barrel sponge growing on coral pinnacle in mangrove channel)

All taken with Fuji S2, 12-24 DX or 105 mm, two Ikelite SS200s (for my sins - they're on their annual trip back to Ohio again as I write).

Frogfish

Hi Robert, loved the gallery. Beautiful work. What boat/dive op did you use? How would you rate them?

BTW, you might want to send your Ike's to Indiana instead of Ohio.

Robert, very nice collection of images.....really liked all the WA shots.....what is the typical vis?

Karl

Visibility in Raja Empat varies by location and even during a dive, but typically wasn't great. Some places it cleared up below 25 or 30 meters, but then it tended to be dark. We had good viz in the islands West of Misool, and at Melissa's Reef. Waters in most East Misool sites are, shall we say, rich in nutrients, but still spectacular. I'll post a shot at the end of this msg showing what I mean.

The Bidadari is run by DiveKomodo. They used to run the Evening Star II, a beautiful old schooner, now retired. Their current boat is the Bidadari, a Phinisi schooner. I only realized as we went aboad in Sorong that it is the old Sea Contacts I - which happened to be the first liveaboard vessel I'd ever been on.

The boat is not luxurious, but perfectly adequate. It has a new engine and compressor, and a good dive tender. Food is OK. Not 5-star cuisine, but you're not paying 5-star prices either. They mainly operate on a charter basis. Six cabins, and the normal max no. of guests is 12.

Mark Heighes, the Aussie who runs DiveKomodo, is a great guy. He has been running dive boats in Indonesia for a long time, knows the siets and understands photographers. He started out in the business working for his aunt and uncle, Rod and Valerie Taylor.

Mark and I are working together on various issues involving Komodo National Park for The Nature Conservancy, including liaison between TNC and the Park authorities with all the liveaboard operators, so it would be awkward for me to "rate" any of the liveaboard boats I've been on, but diving with Mark was a very good time.

This gives an idea of the visibility at some of the East Misool sites. This was shot with a 12-24 mm lens wide open, so the closer divers starting to disappear in the mist are probably about 6-8 meters away, the two more distant divers maybe 10-12 m.

I consider this about the limit for shooting wide-angle effectively, as even the very close main subject is affected, but this is also about as bad as it ever got. This shot was also taken very shallow, maybe 14-15 meters. Deeper, it gets dark pretty fast.

At the other end of the scale, in the image below, the camera is pointed almost straight up. The top half of the frame is dissected limestone karst formations above the water, and clouds. This water was very clear indeed.

Indiana? Now I know what I've been doing wrong all thse years.

Frogfish

Robert

Your strobes are going to Indiana via Ohio. Where's the queensland grouper shot? The colors look ok on many of the shots. Only a few needed some color correction and curves/shadow/highlights adjustment. Also is it me or are there a few shots where there's distortion of some sort in part of the pics, with the diopter ones I mean.

You may want to ignore Paul. He's probably groggy playing daddy to a newborn.

Sand dollars were all over the place when we dived in our not-so-secret dives in North Bali. I suppose you walked too far for those too? LOL

My strobes seem to travel more often than I do. If only they could get United miles and transfer them to me.

The Giant Queensland Grouper was shot in the mangrove channel, in the islands to the west of Misool. Not a full adult, not much over a meter, or thereabouts, and still some juvenile coloration on tail and rear of body. We had a couple full grown GQGs earlier, including one monster on an early morning dive at an island east of Misool. It was deep, and very dark. The fish was on a big ledge - Mark H. almost swam into its mouth before realizing it wasn't a cave, then sort of levitated in the water, it's hard to explain. The grouper then swam right by me, but I blew the shot, out of focus and underexposed. At the time, it looked to me to be about the size of a Volkswagon, but based on the photograph I tried to take, I must have been pretty narked, so who knows.

The other GQG was big too, but nothing like the first one. No shot of that one either. It was down a lot deeper than I wanted to go - they don't seem to like shallow. In any case, the conventional wisdom that there are no big fishes in Raja Empat may need to be revised.

I'm not sure what you mean by distortion in the diopter over/unders. There is a refraction thing with the mangrove roots - they don't line up perfectly above and below water. I think that's just physics. The other thing you might be talking about is that I had trouble holding the housing steady to line up the seam in the diopter with the water level on the dome. Some shots had a noticeable horizontal line from the diopter seam cutting across the water line. I used clone and/or healing tool to fix up some shots I otherwise liked, and might have done a crude job of it. The next time I try over-unders, I'm going to put a lot of flotation under the housing.

Nope, never noticed the sand $ at that other place.

Frogfish

My favourite two above are the pair of filefish and the soft coral mangrove split level. Both of which I find very pleasing to the eye.

I was also interested to see the archer fish in your gallery. They are not a species I have ever seen for myself (in the wild). There are also some amazingly full of life wide angle scenic shots in the gallery.

I'll be visiting your gallery again for a slower browse.

Alex

I really like the schooling Scads shot and the O/U with soft coral. The numerous unidentified species in your gallery are an eye opener too.

One comment on the Tabula page, I find the image you have in the background very distracting, the specular reflections on the fish often compete with the link texts, and the fish are so much bigger than your thumbnail links that they look like they are the main point of the page.

Horses for courses of course, but I would desaturate and fade the image in your background a little.

RE: your colours. Some of the shots look a little less saturated than Paul's shots usually look, but I would not consider them "wrong" in any meaningful way.

Thanks for the gallery. Raja Empat is high on the list, that's for sure.

I really enjoyed (and am inspired by) your gallery. I was especially taken by how the queenfish(?) are "emerging" from the frame, and the swarms of sweepers on the reef ... I know those silver fish can be tricky!

My strobes seem to travel more often than I do.  If only they could get United miles and transfer them to me....

Well feel better that it's going to be still Star Alliance and it may even enjoy the ride in the cabin.

I think that refraction thing is probably the diopter. I thought it was camera shake but the rest of the picture is sharp. That 2GB card made you very trigger happy.

Maybe you'll find these scenes familiar:

Thanks to all for the very nice comments. Responding variously...

- I'd never seen archer fish before either, Alex. I was disappointed not to see the NatGeo footage behavior - i.e., shooting down insects etc. from the mangroves with a stream of water, but I suppose that only happens when there are good things hanging around on the mangrove branches to shoot and eat. The only insects I ran into under the mangroves were mosquitos, which kept biting me on the forehead. I was glad I was taking the anti-malarials.

- Thanks, Craig, for the advice on the Tabula title page. The background image was (and is) a bit of an experiment. I'd already decided I needed to tone it down a bit, but hadn't got around to it. Also your comments (and from others by email) on the colors, which were reassuring. I don't know if the reduced saturation is my monitor, or the CS converter. I think I was getting better saturated images when I was using the Fuji converter, but the CS raw converter interface is easier and faster, especially for fixing white balance and shadows. The way the Adobe raw converter is integrated into PS is nice too. It's a dilemma.. In the next few weeks, I hope to get the Bali and Komodo pages updated and back up on the website. Looking back a few nights ago at some shots I that worked up before I got PS CS is making me wonder whether I shouldn't go back to the Fuji converter after all.

- Thanks, CeeDave. I'm going to put one the (?) queenfish shots and some others where I'm unsure (or completely baffled) about ID up on the Critter ID forum and hope for help. Up to now, my library of ID books has been generally sufficient for most places I've been, but Raja Empat was a different story.

- Drew, did you somehow shoot those u/w seascapes as panoramas, or were these cropped? Very familiar scenery indeed, esp. the first one. And you're right about the 2GB card too, I did get a bit triggerhappy.

Re: your earlier message, I was looking at the Queensland Grouper (E. lanceolatus) entry in Gerald Allen's book last night. These are apparently the biggest bony fish (i.e., excepting sharks and mantas) that anyone will ever see on a coral reef, up to 3 meters in length and 400 kg. (Don't some billfish get that big?) There have been reports of fatal attacks by E. lanceolatus on divers, which doesn't seem implausible to me at all. I just wish my shot of the big one had been half-decent.

Frogfish

Great stuff Robert, i love the scads and dock pilings shot.

YOur colours look fine to me, i have my monitor set to Adobe RGB 98, perhaps your buddy has his set to something different than you have yours set to and therefore the difference??

Can't believe you have never seen Archer fish before. If i recall correctly, haven't you lived in Asia Pacific for a long time?

We get them in droves in Yap and Palau, mind you still haven't seen one spit...

Thought they would be fairly common all over Indo as well, guess not...

Mike

Yep, been out here a long time, but nope, never saw archer fish before. But then again I've never been to a place where it was possible to get right into mangroves like this. Innaresting fish.

To the very limited extent that I was able to calibrate my LCD monitor, I belive it is also set to Adobe RGB 98, which is also the colour space I use in Photoshop.

Frogfish

Frogfish

Those shots were badly stitched captures off video. Still haven't decided on which camera to house yet. D70 is really good enough for the run but the lightest housing with dome port will go for over $2k. I've been very hardpressed to justify new toys this year after what I've seen in Thailand.

And again, your colors are ok save a few of the schooling fish shots. Paul was probably tired from changing nappies all night.

Where's the mimic stuff?

Where's the mimic stuff?

Unscanned. (And I think my scanner may need a trip to the Nikon people in Singapore to get the mirrors cleaned again.)

If those are stitched video, I'm impressed.

Frogfish

Hi Robert,

Impressive stuff! I particularly liked the schooling sweeper shots. I also like the macro soft coral shots.

You have a nudibranch ID'd as Chromodoris lochi. I think it may be C. annae, which Bill Rudman says "is characterised by the dark specks in the blue areas". The orange and blue ones are always confusing, but C.lochi is usually light blue and pinky mauve.

Interesting what you say about your scanner mirror...could that be what's causing little bits of missed info on scans from my relatively new Nikon scanner??

Lovely stuff; can't wait to be in your area of the world in a few months!

Cheers,

Marli

Thanks, Marli. I've corrected the nudi ID, and some mistaken IDs on other inverts as well. Thanks much to others who pointed out errors, esp. LH.

I'd be surprised that you'd be having serious problems with dirt on the mirrors with a new scanner. But it's a big problem here in the tropics, if you don't have a permanently air-conditioned dry room for things like scanners to live in.

Drop me an email with your travel plans and dates.

Frogfish

I really liked them all, but the scads and the o/u shot in the mangroves are impressive. I didn't realize the water is that clear around mangroves, never dove there myself.

Very nice work. I am going there next fall with Deb Fugitt's group. Now, I am really psyched!

Hal