My Art and Music

Mahahual in Costa Maya

Pictures of fish mean another diving trip.  This time to Mahahual, Mexico. 

It was a 4 hour drive south of Cancun which was the hardest part of the trip.  The diving was fun and the little fishing village was totally charming.

These are so much my favorites as they are so beautiful and delicate in the current of the ocean.

Isn't this fish beautiful?....they are so gorgeous in the ocean, but hard to hold still.  Mahahual is pristine reef - not dived much and this makes the marine life a little more curious and therefore a little easier to photography - this part was really fun.

As was this....

OK - what makes this so special?....well being a newbie anemone aficionado (cause that's where cleaning shrimp hang out and they are so kewl!!!), I didn't know that this puffy, sorta pointy stuff was, but it was really curious.  I stayed around it for a while to check it out and just see what all it was.  When I got back home and looked it up in my Paul Humann and Ned DeLoach book, found it it was an anemone and a place where shrimp hang out - and looked at the picture a little longer and voila - a Pederson Shrimp is in the lower left corner!!!!    Now how cool is this!

It was hard to get better after that - but here it is - a squid!!!!  I've seen them before, but not like here.  We saw about 3 schools in all and one had about 30 or so squid in it.  They're hard to see at first, and sometimes you can almost run into the little things before you finally see them.  They are usually about  6" to 9" long and just the whole idea is pretty amazing with their floaty wing type things on the side and their squirting legs/arms thingies with their human-like eyes and actions, they are just a lot of fun to sit and watch - or are they watching us?......hmmmmm!

So instead of including umpteen million pictures here I put them up in a little video and uploaded it to.....

yep - you guessed it!  You Tube!!! Click the pict above and see my little video!

Some other pictures

I put some of my better shots on flickr.com

See them here

Cozumel, 2008.....again

We love Cozumel - it's so much fun and we seem to see such beautiful things and take such beautiful pictures. 

Flamingo Tongues are always special....their shell is this background "creamy" color, and the mantel covers the shell...the dots with black outlines is the mantel.  The mantel withdraws when the mollusk is disturbed or attacked.

I NEVER lose my enthusiasm or fascination with these delicate fern plants.  They are everywhere in all sorts of forms, colors, shapes, but they are all delicate and there to grab up the goodies to eat in the water.

These little guys are the illusive Splendid Toadfish and seeing one in it's enclave is a real treat.  Usually when someone is pointing under an over-hang, there's a toadfish in there.

Then every once in a while you can coax one out and it's a load of fun.  Never having seen this before, I had no idea of the color and hence the name:  Splendid Toadfish!

The color is extraordinary and in the strangest places, but so are the coral and all the other life and shapes in the underwater paradise.

Ta-da! One of my best photos to date of the spotted anemone shrimp - they are transparent and extremely hard to capture - I particularly like the eyes.

US Virgin Islands, Part One

This is my first trip on a liveaboard, and can't think of a better way to do this than with the Nekton company.  They've done this for a long time and have this art down to a fine science.  The staff is really fun and of course they love diving so they make everything really terrific.

They do a briefing at each new location.  Sometimes they move during the day to offer us a new site for the afternoon and evening dives.  They have night dives every night.  For the novice or not familiar with diving....night diving is a lot of fun.  There are things out that you don't see during the day, and even though it may sound terribly frightening in the dark water, when you get 8 or more on a night dive, there is a lot of light out there, and more importantly you know where everyone is.  The dive masters usually draw a colorful map of all the sites to see at the site, and by the time they are finished and every one has asked their questions, we're all rearing to go.

There is of course all the beautiful and very sweet stuff, and then there's the really cool stuff

OK this guy maybe isn't all that pretty, but to get this shot was a very big deal.  You have to find them first of all, then they have to come out and growl at you and they can be very shy, and then you have to click the shutter at just the right time, have the right exposure, aperature opening, shutter speed - it just isn't all that easy. 

This always reminds me of "Frenchie" the cleaning shrimp in Finding Nemo....this is a banded shrimp with those glorious bands on his cleaning claws.  Theoretically if you put your finger out there he will clean it for you.  Divers do this all the time however I haven't gotten my guts up to do this yet.

Then there's the people who stay out too late and their eyes are red....they deserve this after having too much fun the night before. No red-eye correction helps this even a little bit.  These are cute little arrow crabs.  They can range from about 4" across to almost 10" including their leg span.  They look like little spiders with this pointed head and two eyes off to the side. The blue ocean is filled with all sorts of exotic creatures.  This is part of the fascination with diving.  Photography just seems to be a natural extension of this - to record a lot of what is under water.

Then you have the very, very tiny - these 4 little drum fishes are about 1/2" large, with the small one at the bottom being about 1/4" in size.  They were all floating together within a little reef area, which had obviously offered them enough sanctuary to survive this long.

This is a face only a mother could love...and especially that crouchy expression on his face - but those eyes don't help - unless you're looking for a flounder, and this is the best way to find them - those eyes go in all sorts of directions.

And this beautiful thing is called fire coral....anything with white tips is almost always fire coral and stay away from it.  It causes a fierce burn on human skin - and the white tips are just the minor burn, the older branches causes even worse burn.  Sometimes what's beautiful is just enough to stay away from!

And now for something completely different...

....too bad I can't do that with John Cleese's voice, but alas this is the real world.

I'm reorganizing some of my blogs so they fit better.  I think my diving & diving photography fit better on "My Art" part of my blog.  This is the beginning!!!!

As this blog matures, I'll probably put this someplace completely different, but for now this seems the logical place. So named this in a new category:  A Completely Different Tangent - Diving. 

As well as my design, love of fashion/clothing, art and music, I dive.  And it's fun to log about all my adventures as I've matured from a simple little snorkler

to this:

Yep - those are sharks. 

In just a year we've been to Cozumel, Roatán, Bahamas, with trips back to Cozumel, US Virgin Islands and Curaçao planned for this winter. 

What I plan to do here is log in those trips and keep a photo and verbal journal.