Kailua's really quiet right now...

Ironman is over and the town emptied out quite quickly. Pat and I were running errands today and drove through town and it was about as empty as you'll see in on a late afternoon.

We had a pretty good swell come in during yesterday's dives. Today it was coming in real good from the north, it's supposed to be coming down tomorrow. We'll just dive some south facing dive sites and stay clear of the north facing ones for an extra day.

I've been trying to get a decent shot of a Flame Angel (Centropyge loriculus) for quite some time. They're really tough to get a photo of because they are very shy and flighty and will dart into the finger corals if you approach them or swim above them. They used to be pretty rarely seen a few years back, but they're seen quite a bit more often these days.

I saw 5 of them on my dive yesterday. I saw this one towards the end of the dive and decided to try something... in underwater photography, the general rule is get as close as possible, get as little water between you and your subject as possible. As this is really really difficult to do with Flame Angels I decided to take a different tack. The Canon G9 camera has a pretty darned powerful flash, and you usually use the diffuser to help it light up your subject as the flash is very directional and won't get good coverage when shooting close. I decided to not use the diffuser and see if the flash was strong enough to light up the Flame Angel at a longer distance with the camera really zoomed in. The first of these pics was taken at the usual distance before removing the diffuser, I was just lucky to see it for a moment and get a shot off. The second one was taken at a distance of about 5 feet without the diffuser on the flash. This is about a 2 and a half inch fish so the camera was really zoomed in for that shot, but it worked OK. I'm thinking Pat actually has some better pictures of one, but these give you a great idea of how colorful this little fish is.

Later,

Steve