Some cool facts about animals images:
Underwater Photography - Abort, Retry, Fail
Image by Boogies with Fish
www.messersmith.name/wordpress/2010/01/04/underwater-phot...
Back in the Bad Old Days of MS-DOS, if you were working with computers you would see, probably once an hour (it seemed so, anyway) the unhelpful message on your screen: Abort, Retry, Fail. None of these three suggestions were ever of much help. It was Microsoft's way of saying, "That's not gonna happen, man." Yeah, sure, you could usually figure out what was causing the problem, but most of the time there wasn't much you could do about it.
You'll be happy to hear that there is a way that you can once again experience these excruciating moments: through the magic of underwater photography. I've collected a little gallery of horrors to illustrate a few of they infinite things that can go terribly wrong. I hope it amuses you, as an observer, more than it does me, as a practitioner.
SUBJECT RUNS AWAY
I wanted, longed, deeply desired, the moment that I saw this fish to capture its soul in digital bits. Sadly, the job is botched. This is a rather rare yellow colour variation of the Blackspotted Puffer (Arothron nigropunctatus):
When I say rare, I mean that I have never seen this species with as much yellow on its body. It really is a beauty. This one, as you can see, was at a cleaning station - it's like a car wash for fish. The underpaid and little appreciated workers in this car wash are the little cleaner-fish, one of which you can see here vainly chasing the Puffer in hopes of gobbling a few more parasites from its skin. You can see the little Bluestriped Cleanerfish trailing along behind. These little puffers run away (probably screaming in fishy terror) as soon as anything big approaches. They don't swim very fast - just fast enough to spoil the shot.
The observant observer will note the the image is spoilt by motion blur. I was trying to pan the camera to follow the movement of the fish, which should have produced a reasonably sharp image of the fish with a motion blurred background. As it happens, I got it half right; both fish and background are blurred by the camera movement. I'm putting this one in the RETRY category. The big problem is that I may never see such a magnificent specimen again.
SUBJECT LOOKS PRETTY UNDERWATER - TERRIBLE ON THE SCREEN
These little Striped Catfish (Plotosus lineatus) looked ever so pretty fluttering in the lazy current along the bottom at the Eel Garden close to Pig Island on Saturday: However, the finished image is sadly lacking any interest whatsoever. You had to be there. As soon as I started working with the image I realised that the magic was in the motion. You can't truly capture motion in a still image. I'm putting this one in the FAIL category.
SUBJECT IS A CAMERA TEASER
This juvenile Midnight Snapper (Macolor macularis) is a pretty cool fish. They don't look anything like the adult, which is a big brown lump of a thing. However, cool or not, this fish is a nightmare to photograph. Like many fish, it has an inbuilt standoff distance or "comfort zone" which you can, under no circumstances, violate. If it could talk it would be saying, "Back off, Jack!":
I did manage to get this rather pathetic shot from about four feet away with the flash turned on. It was as close as I could get. Apparently not many photographers have done a lot better. I Googled for images of this species and didn't find anything much clearer than the shot above, except for images that were obviously shot in aquariums. I'll let this one pass with a RETRY.
SUBJECT DARTS AROUND FRANTICALLY
This rather uncommon species, the Red And Black Anemonefish (Amphiprion melanopus) swims spasmodically back and forth in its host and never even gives you an adequate opportunity to frame the shot. If fact, you're lucky if the fish is even in the frame when you push the shutter release. I only barely managed to catch it in this shot: This is compounded by the confounded shutter lag that is common in point-and-shoot cameras. I'd guess that the Canon G10 I'm currently using waits about a third of a second before capturing the image after I press the shutter release. So now, you have to guess where the fish is going to be during your next eye-blink. It's like guessing which grain of popcorn will explode next. This one can only be a RETRY.
SUBJECT DOES SOMETHING INAPPROPRIATE
Sometimes you just get a surprise. I would not ordinarily take a picture of an animal defecating. It's simply not that interesting unless you're a kid obsessed with scatological humour. We were at the deep end of the Eel Garden's sandy slope where I was shooting the Red and Black Anemonefish when my dive buddy Carol Dover directed my attention to this big Sea Cucumber (Thelenota anax):
As you can plainly see, it was enjoying a nice, leisurely, satisfying poop. Without going into the unsavory anatomical details, I'll simply point out the you can clearly see where the poop came from. There's quite a bit of it, since the critter eats about 99% sand and digests only the digestible bits. All the rest comes out as tidy little sand sausages.
I'm putting this one in the ABORT category.
look down
Image by paladinsf
The Pine Barrens, also known as the Pinelands, is a heavily forested area of coastal plain
Coastal plain
A coastal plain is an area of flat, low-lying land adjacent to a seacoast and separated from the interior by other features. One of the world's longest coastal plains is located in western South America. The southwestern coastal plain of North America is notable for its species diversity...
stretching across southern New Jersey
South Jersey
South Jersey is a colloquial term, with no consensus definition, covering the southern portions of the U.S. state of New Jersey between the lower Delaware River and the Atlantic Ocean....
. The name "pine barrens
Pine barrens
Pine barrens, also known as pine plains, sand plains, pinelands, pine bush, and pitch pine-scrub oak barrens, occur throughout the northeastern U.S. from New Jersey to Maine as well as the Midwest and Canada...
" refers to the area's sandy, acidic, nutrient-poor soil, to which the crops originally imported by European settlers didn't take well. However, these uncommon conditions enable the Pine Barrens to support a unique and diverse spectrum of plant life, including orchids and carnivorous plant
Carnivorous plant
Carnivorous plants are plants that derive some or most of their nutrients from trapping and consuming animals or protozoans, typically insects and other arthropods. Carnivorous plants appear adapted to grow in places where the soil is thin or poor in nutrients, especially nitrogen, such as acidic...
s. The area is also notable for its populations of rare pygmy Pitch Pine
Pitch Pine
The Pitch Pine is a small-to-medium sized pine, native to eastern North America. This species occasionally hybridizes with other pine species such as Loblolly Pine , Shortleaf Pine , and Pond Pine The Pitch Pine (Pinus rigida) is a small-to-medium sized (6-30 m) pine, native to eastern North...
s and other plant species that depend on fire to reproduce (fire is very frequent in the Pine Barrens). The sand that composes much of the area's soil is referred to by the locals as sugar sand
Sugar sand
Sugar sand, found in some areas of the Eastern United States, is a fine silt made up of ultrafine mineral sand mixed with a large percentage of organic granules. Because of its lightness it can easily form quicksand in hollows...
.
Despite its proximity to the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia and New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
, and the fact that the Garden State Parkway
Garden State Parkway
The Garden State Parkway is a 172.4-mile limited-access toll parkway that stretches the length of New Jersey from the New York state line at Montvale, New Jersey, to Cape May at the southern tip of the state. Its name refers to the state nickname, the "Garden State." Most New Jersey residents...
and Atlantic City Expressway
Atlantic City Expressway
The Atlantic City Expressway is a , controlled-access toll road in New Jersey, managed and operated by the South Jersey Transportation Authority. It serves as an extension of Route 42 in Turnersville southeast to Atlantic City...
run directly through it, the Pine Barrens remains largely rural and undeveloped. The Pine Barrens also helps recharge the 17 trillion gallon Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer
Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer
The Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer system is in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It receives about 44 inches of precipitation each year. About fifty percent of this water is transpired by vegetation or evaporates back into the atmosphere. A small amount enters streams and rivers as storm runoff. About 17 to...
containing some of the purest water in the United States. As a result of all these factors, 1.1 million acres (4,500 km²) of the Pine Barrens were designated the Pinelands National Reserve (the nation's first National Reserve) in 1978, and it was designated a United Nations International Biosphere Reserve in 1983. Development in the Pinelands National Reserve is strictly controlled by an independent state/federal agency called the New Jersey Pinelands Commission. The Pinelands Reserve contains the Wharton
Wharton State Forest
Wharton State Forest is a state park in the U.S. state of New Jersey. The largest single tract of land in the state park system of New Jersey, it encompasses approximately 115,000 acres of the Pinelands northwest of Hammonton, in Burlington, Camden, and Atlantic counties. The entire park is...
, Brendan T. Byrne
Brendan T. Byrne State Forest
The Brendan T. Byrne State Forest is a 34,725-acre area in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in New Jersey's Burlington and Ocean Counties. It is the state's second largest state forest . There are 25 miles of hiking trails and a camping area...
(formerly Lebanon), and Bass River
Bass River State Forest
Bass River State Forest is a 23,563-acre state park in the Pine Barrens in Burlington County, New Jersey, United States. The first of New Jersey's state forests, it was acquired by the state in 1905 for public recreation, water conservation, and wildlife and timber management. Sixty-seven-acre ...
state forests.
