School of blues
A school of blue parrotfish (scarus coeruleus) foraging in the sand. We don't often see blue parrotfish and we could not recall a previous encounter with a school of them. That said, Wikipedia says that they school for mating and foraging, so maybe this behavior is more common in other locations. But for us it was a distinctive moment.
Besides the usual challenges of not blowing away the sand (with the strobe) and getting close enough to them to reveal their colors and framing them in a pleasing way (fish schools are easy to watch and yet hard to photograph), they were kicking up a huge amount of sand, which ruined many images. (Strobe light bounces off of suspended particles to create ugly "backscatter" ... a bane of underwater photography.)
School of blues
A school of blue parrotfish (scarus coeruleus) foraging in the sand. We don't often see blue parrotfish and we could not recall a previous encounter with a school of them. That said, Wikipedia says that they school for mating and foraging, so maybe this behavior is more common in other locations. But for us it was a distinctive moment.
Besides the usual challenges of not blowing away the sand (with the strobe) and getting close enough to them to reveal their colors and framing them in a pleasing way (fish schools are easy to watch and yet hard to photograph), they were kicking up a huge amount of sand, which ruined many images. (Strobe light bounces off of suspended particles to create ugly "backscatter" ... a bane of underwater photography.)