Red Bass

Blogged by Simon on January 12, 2009 9:11pm | Last updated by Simon on August 13, 2010 8:22pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Red Bass (Lutjanus Bohar)I recently returned from a 4-day trip to the Great Barrier Reef, aboard Spirit Of Freedom. Where do I start? It is an excellent boat, everything from the spacy cabins, generously laid out dive deck to the good food and professional crew makes diving an easy and fun experience. Definitely the best liveaboard style dive boat I have taken out of Cairns so far. My camera and dive gear was packed and got plenty of action.

The first shot from this trip was taken at the Cod Hole near Lizard Island. We went there to feed the resident population of Potato Cod (Epinephelus tukula) and got lucky with 3-4 of them at the same time. Accompanying the Cod was a school of rather fierce looking Red Bass (Lutjanus bohar), attempting to scavenge food, and where the Potato Cod have a pecking order where only the largest animal gets to feed, the Red Bass were swarming all around us in great numbers, ready to snap up any food scraps left over. Also, contrary to the Cod, who sucks in the food like a vacuum cleaner, these guys also have quite sharp teeth which they aren’t shy using, so we tried to keep our fingers close.

The picture itself was taken with a 105mm macro lens on my D300 camera. The subject was 3-4m away which gives the image a blur around the edges which I didn’t originally plan for, but now happen to like. Aperture was set to f/16 to get some depth of field, shutter time set to 1/125 in manual mode at ISO 800. I tried shooting in Aperture priority mode but I found the experience rather difficult under water as there never seems to be enough light to measure for (with a usable shutter time), so I settled for manual and adjusted the flash until I got a proper exposure. Lucky for me the Bass were hungry and not going anywhere while I kept working with the camera. The image isn’t edited, other than for some digital noise reduction and cropping.

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