Variegated Lizardfish

Blogged by Simon on January 13, 2009 12:05pm | Last updated by Simon on April 19, 2010 11:09am | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Variegated Lizardfish (Synodus variegatus)From time to time when you go diving, you see something new you have never encountered before or even remotely contemplated existing. This was the case when I saw this little stunner which according to “Coral Reef Fishes, Indo Pacific and Carribean, Ewald Lieske, Robert Myers, 2001″ is likely a Variegated Lizardfish (Synodus variegatus), hanging out on a rock in about 10m at a dive site called Pixie Gardens, located on Ribbon Reef #9. It was more difficult to spot as the animal blends in well with its coral background, but what a find. I immediately pulled up the camera and aimed. Lucky for me, Mr. Lizard was not intimidated and happily posed for a couple of close ups.

The shot was taken with the 105mm macro lens, less than a meter away from the animal. ISO was set to 800 and I have applied Noise Ninja to remove some of the grain that setting tends to produce while giving me better shutter times. Aperture is f/16, exposed for 1/100s in manual mode and flash is set to 25% on both flash arms that are pointing inwards at approx 45-60 degrees. On this shot, I successfully avoided backscatter with that setting but I didn’t always get this lucky on the same trip – flash arms are difficult to place right and I’m dedicating a whole dive in the bay back home in Sydney to this soon, I decided.

I’m reasonably happy with the way the shot turned out, except maybe this time I should have settled for shallower depth of field to blur the background even more and make the aninal in the foreground stand out. No editing was done other than crop.

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