Diving the Mayan Riviera

Before going to the Mayan Riviera in April 2011, I thought that diving there would be like diving Cozumel's little brother. The two are geographically close enough together that the amazingness of one had to trickle down, right?

To temper our expectations, our dive master quickly told us on the boat that diving here was nothing like diving in Cozumel. However, after he found out where we got certified, he challenged himself to find us a two headed turtle. That he didn't succeed in doing, but he did definitely take us on 2 great dives...

We saw our first lion fish

Canon SD870 IS

And a large southern stingray

Canon SD870 IS

But the highlight of both dives were these guys. On the second dive, as one diver turned and look back at Maggie and I, he got really excited and pointed behind us. We turned around to see two huge fish swimming straight at us out of the blue. At first, I thought shark.. maybe because of their grey suits. But I quickly realized they weren't. They were nothing like anything that I had seen before. They looked very little like your run-of-the-mill fish and they swam in unison - almost as if they were attached to one another. They weren't afraid of us and swam right at us, waiting until they were only a few inches away before swerving to circle around and harass another diver. I was able to quickly snap this shot as they came straight at me...

Canon SD870 IS - two large remoras swimming straight for me

With all the time they spent circling us, I was able to get 2 more decent pictures...

Canon SD870 IS - 2 remoras, with another diver not too far away to give a bit of perspective on how big these guys were

Canon SD870 IS - Clear shot of 2 remoras as they swam past

Back on board the boat, we found out they were remoras. One diver told us a story about how he had an encounter with a much smaller one on a past dive where it kept attaching itself to his neck. No way these guys would be able to attach to themselves to any of us... they were at least 2-3 ft long. Only things these guys would be sticking to would be larger sharks and whales...

Short video of Maggie freaking out after the remoras charged right at her...

Trying to fix my Pictures with GIMP

Since I can't afford (read: too cheap) to pay for an expensive piece of software like Photoshop, I'll be doing my photo editing with its free brother: GIMP. I've done some basic picture editing in the past, so kind of I know my way around the basic functions... but to do anything like colour correction, I had to go to the interwebs for help. You may recognize these pictures from an earlier post.  Here's my first crack at colour correction and photo manipulation.

Canon SD870 IS - original

And after:

Colour corrected using GIMP

Another:

Canon SD870 IS - original

And after:

Colour corrected with GIMP

Obviously nothing will match real light from a strobe, but I think these came out pretty good. I'm a bit unsure about the purple splotches in both pictures, but looking at the original (tiny fish picture), it's hard to say whether the purple colour can be anything else.  All the other colours seem to be pretty accurate. This technique is definitely a decent fallback for all my washed out pictures.

All the credit goes to tankedup-imaging.com for the tutorial on how to make this happen.

The tutorial is pretty easy to follow but seems to be a bit out of date (reference to GIMP 2.4 being the latest), so a few UI screenshots are a bit different than the latest version I just downloaded (2.8). I'll be writing up an updated tutorial using GIMP 2.8 and post it in a Photo Tips section. The goal is that as I (hopefully) become more proficient in GIMP, I'll have a running list of tips and techniques that I can share and also refer back to.

Following a Glowstick at the Great Barrier Reef

On top of the 8 dives to complete our open water certification, we were offered an optional night dive. We were apprehensive at first - with only a few dives under our belt, it sounded scary to be diving in the complete dark. But all the other divers/staff that we talked to highly recommended it... just follow the glowstick!  So we thought.. since we're already here...

And we were so glad we did that dive. When we first jumped in, we were a bit disoriented cause it really was pitch black. But once we got our bearings, the dive was awesome. Sharks were out and about at night, so we saw a lot of them! Laura (divemaster and glowstick carrier) found a lobster and a turtle tucked away in the reef sleeping. Those were great to see... not so great for pictures though. I tried, but they were all either filled with backscatter or a blurred mess. I gave up after a few shots and went to video... here's a compilation of some of the sharks we saw.

You might by wondering why there're two red dots throughout the video. Found out later it's cause the CCD sensor in my camera was starting to go. So it's not just the videos... look closely at all my pictures and you can see the same issue - just that it's more pronounced against a black background. Pretty shitty cause this camera wasn't even that old... had it for maybe 2-3 years tops. Ah well... electronics these days...

Mike on the other hand was able to get a couple decent shots. You can see this fish swimming around the sharks in the video. Can't remember what fish they were, but they definitely weren't small...

Canon IXUS 130 - playing tag with the light from our torches

Turns out these fish got to be pretty smart, too. They learned to adapt to the night divers with their torches, and used the light to help them find food. If the light catches one of their prey, they'll quickly swoop in and devour it. That was the reason these were everywhere and kept circling the light. Kinda funny from our perspective, but really sucks for those little guys that just wanted to sleep.