In a previous life I was an occasional scuba diver. I used to travel around sites in Malaysia with my son. There is something about knowing that you are both enjoying a decompression stop pee that makes for bonding, and it was fun diving together. To spice things up, we had a Sea & Sea underwater camera. It was film in those days, so you were limited to the number of shots you could take on a dive. And after the dive there was the long and tiresome process of rinsing and drying the camera and then cleaning and re-greasing the hundreds (OK, five) seals that were crucial to ensure the internals stayed dry at 30 metres. Everything was manual, and the chances of achieving a single usable shot from a roll of film were slight.
Still, after many, many rolls, we got a few. Actually I think my son got most of them, like this beautiful whale shark off Ningaloo reef in Australia:
The urge to catch a photo underwater returned last week when I went windsurfing and discovered the sea to be heavily populated with jellyfish of a type I have not seen here before. Excuse me if I launch into some detailed Cnidaria classifications, but the normal visitors to our waters are:
- Big white bastards. Look more dangerous than they are. Or:
- Small brown bastards. Are more dangerous than they look.
But the latest arrivals are big and brown, and judging the sting reports, they are total bastards. So I thought I should try and photograph one. Armed with my Panasonic TS1, which I bought to make windsurfing videos but will also take single shots if I ask it, I ventured out on my windsurfer to hunt them down. This was a total failure. By the time I had quickly dropped the sail and slowly dropped myself in the water, there was no sign of a jellyfish. So instead, Craig and I went out on SUP boards. He rounded them up in a sort of frantic paddling motion whilst unnecessarily shouting “yee hah!” , and I stuck my hand in the water and tried to snap them. And this is what I got:
The colour of the water is somewhat worrying. I remember muddy brown, not radioactive vomit green. The jellyfish was more brown than orange, and of course the image is out of focus and noisy. More work required; but he does look like a total bastard and I hope I don’t fall off into him at some point.