Description

What do you get when you combine, clear waters, lots of sunshine, good divers & tonnes of fish! You get great photos of course, well maybe, a few things still need to come together, like the fish moving out of the way, not crashing into coral behind you and students who stay out of the backdrop. Lets say it all mostly came together for this one shot.

Thankfully Nina is an instructor with good underwater judgement for photography. She later told me she had seen my light through the big ball of snappers and decided to swim through the school toward the lights, it was entirely unplanned & as I saw the fish parting and Nina emerging, it was a bit of a mad rush to get the settings locked in and snap a picture.

It was also one of the few days where conditions were right for practicing Wide Angle out at Phi Phi, I was pretty much just there to take photos and conditions were perfect with no current and clear waters! Somehow we also managed to wind up completely alone at the bait ball of Big Eye Snappers. Usually you get all manner of divers with GoPro’s chasing them around ruining any chance of getting shots like this one.

While this was happening, what I failed to notice was the large coral structure behind me, a massive mushroom coral head which I was slowly drifting toward. My knees got a nice scraping on it while trying to keep the whole shot in focus and center Nina in the middle of the spiraling snapper. Sometimes you accidentally put your body on the line for a good photo, so I hope my knees understand, also the coral was fine.

Thankfully the shot worked out, the snappers did a good job of creating a nice threaded curve around the subject and props to Nina for holding her breath :)