lundysd

I realize I'm a little late to this party, but I wanted to share my most memorable photo of 2012. As some of you may know, the Pacific Northwest is known for its species of sixgill cowsharks, one of the most ancient species of sharks still around today (and one of the few with only one small dorsal fin). While sixgill sightings were once common, to my knowledge there have been few (if any) sightings in the past 7 years. We were lucky enough to stumble upon a small group of these animals at a particular dive site last summer. It appeared that there were at least 3 distinct sixgills in the area, all relatively young and ranging in size from 3 feet to 9 feet long. This is a photo of the largest animal, a very docile sixgill who allowed us to photograph him for the better part of 30 minutes before we had to return to shallower waters for decompression.

Thanks everyone! We're taking this to the Dept of Fish and Wildlife tomorrow in hopes of getting an emergency ban on GPO harvest at this dive site. Hopefully this will go well and we can open a dialogue about larger changes in the future.

Stellar photos -- this is going to be an exciting rig!

Any chance of getting a full size jpeg at some point?

Love the octo shot and the schooling action Martin -- great stuff

Thanks for the kind words -- the 5th photo was taken with a Tokina 12-24mm set wide open for a 30 sec exposure at ISO3200 -- any longer would have resulted in star trails.  The D7000 does reasonably well at long exposures and high noise, but in hindsight I probably should have stacked multiple exposures to bring out the milky way even more

Here's another composition of the same night sky, plus one during the day for good measure