Islandbound

On a recent dive I came across a trio of seasnakes engaged in mating. The two males were much much briter than the larger female who I believe was probably in the process of shedding due to scale color and the milky eye color. What was interesting was the behaviour of one of the males. He drove off the other suitor despite both being wrapped around the female by positioning his body against the female and pushing the other male off. The 2nd male in the typical sluggish seasnake way moved around the female but couldnt rewrap his body against hers and eventually left. The reason I am posting was the following activity by the dominant male snake was a behavior I have never seen before despite diving with these animals for years. The male rewrapped his body along the upper portion of her torso and while attempting to engage in coitus he began to tap her head fairly hard. The effect was to keep her head down in the rocks. I can only assume this was a dominance action and kept her head down and prevented her from swimming away. As I reviewed the picture series last night I saw from this photo that the male is not only butting her head but has his fangs either in her skin or pressed against her head. Just wanted to share!

I was on a dive yesterday and was able to drift onto a couple of stingrays having sex. The entire event was a first for me and a great experience. The rays danced vertically through the water along the bottom while 4 or 5 more rays swam a perimeter around the couple and me. Eventually the dance stopped and the rays settled to the bottom at 96 feet and stayed their for 4 or 5 minutes. The rays were spinning and fluttering in the water... I am pretty sure the male is on top here... Just about to hit the bottom. The male is holding the female with his mouth in this photo...

On Friday my wife found a very long (almost 5ft) spinal cord (I believe). Does anyone have an idea what it is? The rib bones were up to 20 inches long.

Thanks for the help!

While I was looking at a coral this shark swam right next to me, sorry for the photo cutting his tail off (and this was with a FE lens too...) Is this a wobegon shark and does anyone have a resource for what the typical living range is for them? This picture is from yesterday (22nd) from the Keramas Islands near Okinawa Japan.

Sorry for the update, Ikelite as usual comes through! Or at least, is going to come through. I emailed them via their website and I have to send in the strobe and sync cord for a review. This sucks as I dont have any downtime planned. I do have a set of Sea and Sea strobes and a dual sync cord for them as a crutch though. Hopefully they wont have the parts too long or the repair too expensive.

I have a D90 in a Ikelite D90 housing and a DS160 on the left and a DS125 on the right with the Red Band going to the DS125 side. I have taken hundreds of photos with both strobes firing correctly up until recently. Recently the left strobe DS160 is the only one being picked up during the exposure. The DS125 is still firing at strength but fires a fraction too late and is not lighting up anything. Almost all my photos are at F8 and shutter speed is 1/200. Does anyone have any suggestions to help me?

My D80 literally fell apart during a dive with buttons coming loose in the housing underwater and the screen quitting too. That night I ordered a new housing from Ikelite for my D90 but still had dives to do with no camera available. So... I found that if I slightly bent the right thumb actuator on the Ikelite I could shoot the D90 in manual mode with no problem! I could not access any menu items or the video portion but all I needed was the ablity to change Fstop and Sshutter so off I went! Anyway, these are some photos from yesterday with the D90 and a Tokina 10-17mmFE in an Ikelite D80 housing. This is my friend Toyo who sadly is moving from Okinawa to pursue a diving career as an Instructor in Australia in several weeks. Toyo and Mijo, another friend I dive with frequently here in Japan. Checking out the corals! Coral Canyon Wall Dive Site The water is fairly murky as we have had high winds and a strong current surge from a late season typhoon just south or our island.

I stuck a D90 all the way into a D80 housing without a lens attached and I could do everything from turn it on to snap the photo button. I could even switch from AF to M focus on the left side. All of the buttons on the top left and right worked fine as well as all the buttons on the left side of the screen on the back. The only conflict I could see was the "OK" button and the four buttons arranged in a circle to the right of the screen. That nice new display button on the bottom right of the screen was also out of reach. The nice thing would be to be able to buy a new backplate as I could then switch back and forth to the D80 when service or repair was needed.

I test fit the D90 into the D80 housing last night and it fit perfectly except for some button misalignment on the back right side and then this morning I see that Ikelite on thier website is now to offer a D90 housing. Ikelite doenst mention on thier website though if just the backhalf of the housing can be purchased, does anyone have info on this?

Alex, could you have achieved the more narrow DOF by simply using a smaller f-stop with increased lighting for the background with the DX camera?

That particular kind of stunt is just nasty and does nothing to focus me on sharks but rather on how sick that person must be. In no way would I involve my children either in viewing or visiting that either which is sad because the idea of shark conservation is correct but the means used in this stunt was just plain gross.

From my understanding, the D90 video does not autofocus, you must focus entirely by hand.

This was done while kneeling on the sand at 40 meters or so and shooting offhand.

This is my first large scale panoramic, the ship is just over 100meters long at a depth of 43 meters. I think I finally found the exposure trick to make sure each frame looked fairly similar but I also lucked out that the visiblity remained fairly constant for the photos. There are three divers with doubles near the stern if you can find them that will give you an idea of the scale.