Dive Number: 24 25/03/2010 16.11 St Leonards Pier
Wind: 10-15 knot Northerlies
Tide: 1.5hours before 0.21 low tide at Geelong
Conditions: Slight chop on the surface on a relatively low tide. Visibilty wasn’t very good, but i was planning on macro so didn’t really mind.
Bottom Type: Sandy bottom, with pier pylons.
Visibilty: 4m
Water Temp: 22c
Bottom Time: 103 minutes
Max Depth: 3.3m
Air usage: 105bar/1500psi
SAC: 9.3 litres/min
Details: This was mainly a dive to try out a funnel as a snoot on my SS200 and see how hard it was to work with. It really chewed up the light, but aiming wasn’t as difficult as i would have thought.
Camera Details: Canon 100mm macro, single SS200 strobe with funnel snoot
Dive Report: This was a dive to enter the wonderful world of snoot photography. Its time consuming, frustrating, and kind of annoying, but i can see that it will be worth the practice. I got a few snoot shots in on this dive, but nothing that blew my socks off. I can see the possibilities though.
My first subject was an anemone..a sucker that can swim away from me. I didn’t experiment with different angles, and was just happy to get the light on the subject initially. Maybe some sidelighting skimmed across the face of the anemone would work nicely next time.
Finding it not overly difficult to get the aiming right, i quickly moved on to fish. I spotted a lizardfish which are usually stay pretty still. The snoot really made his eye pop, and gave some nice reflections.
Sand Gobies are everwhere at St Leonards and also make good close up subjects:
The snoot was taking up a lot of battery power, so i took it off and took some general snaps of smaller fish.
A Toothbrush Leather jacket:
A fish thats really common at Cottage, but i’ve never notcied it at St Leonards..a Bullseye:
Some Hulafish:
