Sydney White’s Seahorse

Blogged by Simon on June 08, 2009 1:21am | Last updated by Simon on March 06, 2010 9:42pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Sydney White's Seahorse (Hippocampus Whitei)One thing Sydney has to offer for scuba diving is the White’s Seahorse (Hippocampus whitei). Named after John White, Surgeon General to the First Fleet, these little seahorses can be found throughout the Harbour Bay.

Sydney is where I do most of my diving, and since seahorses are site-faithful, they are relatively easy to spot, despite their relatively small size and skills at camouflage. This photo was taken at our local dive shop in Chowder Bay, where there are quite a few to be found. In fact, we usually show them around to pretty much anyone who comes diving with us. If you get lucky and spot 2 seahorses during their mating dance, you can see them turn bright yellow, albeit me having no such luck when taking this photo.

The shot was taken in about 6m of depth, exposed at f/22 for 1/125s with twin flash guns attached, using a 60mm macro lens, which I had just bought before the dive. It allows you to get closer to your subject than the 105mm lens while maintaining a usable field of view, something that makes it generally easier to use. Seahorses are poor swimmers, so they are easier to stalk for photography than most other species of fish. Most of the time you will find them with their tail wrapped around something to hold on to, this one was no exception.

The image originally had a fair amount of backscatter in it that I decided to blur in Photoshop. Note how the seahorse maintains contour despite the blurred background, which is a neat trick i found in a photoshop tutorial. It involves duplicating the complete image, blurring it, then using a history brush on the upper layer to reveal the sharp foreground object. Worked surprisingly well. Backscatter still plagues most of my underwater photography and I seriously need to work on my flash adjustment to prevent it.

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