Category: Featured
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Decompress Like A Boss
If someone tells you that they like doing decompression, they’re either lying or they haven’t done enough of it to know better. This is a rule. I will concede one very notable exception to this rule, and that is decompression on walls or pinnacles. On walls or pinnacles, a diver can make his or her…
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Anacapa’s Airplane Wreck: TBF Avenger
It’s 1944: two Navy bombers collide midair while participating in a training exercise over Anacapa Island. One goes down on the back side of the island and is never found. The other hits the ocean on the front side of middle Anacapa and sinks to the bottom. Between the two planes, three crewmen are killed.…
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Macro Mania
I love shooting wide angle. When the water is clear, there is nothing more gratifying than that fisheye lens and dome port. Wrecks. Kelp forests. Big animals. Coral reefs. And people. Wide angle means context, and people love context. People identify with the scene. They like seeing themselves, or people like themselves, in the frame.…
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Dreamy Nudibranch
The kelp forest can be a pretty dreamy place. The light coming through the kelp canopy has an ethereal beauty, and the gentle sway of the kelp stalks in light surge could rock you to sleep. I wanted to capture that surreal, unearthly quality in this week’s nudibranch photos.
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A Limerick about the Ornate Ghost Pipefish
There once was a pipefish so ornate, the crinoid it lived in seemed cut-rate. “This feather star’s plain,” said the fish, “I’d not deign “to inhabit so homely an estate.”
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Diving the UB-88 Submarine Wreck
Part of the allure of technical wreck diving is getting the opportunity to experience bits of history that very few others, not even many other divers, get to experience. This is why when I received an invitation to go dive the UB-88, a German WWI U-boat off San Pedro, California, and the only U-boat wreck…
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In Pursuit of Pygmy Seahorses
The scene is a hotel room in Anilao, Philippines. Our heroine is standing over a console table, assembling an underwater camera, when her husband enters the room with news from their dive guide. HUSBAND: The boat is going looking for pygmy seahorses today. How big are they, anyway? Our heroine looks up, instinctively making a…
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How to Fall in Love with Nudibranchs in 12 Easy Steps
It is no secret that I love the nudibranch. But it may come as a surprise that not everyone shares my branchophile tendencies. Fortunately, I have devised a twelve-step program to convert even the most reluctant slug-lover lover into a nudi connoisseur.
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The Saddest Seahorse
You may be guilty of anthropomorphizing marine life when you find yourself asking a seahorse, “Why the long face?”