I will try to post more photos in the next day or two.
The whiteface blenny was taken at Silvertip Bank in Burma Bank area. It is a well known species there but very shy and a bit hard to find. I found him finally on the last dive at Silvertip Bank right at the end before I went up for my safety stop. I had just enough air in my main tank for safety stop so I was on my pony bottle taking his picture. Unfortunately he was very shy and skittish. I had one straight on face shot but there was a little ridge right in front on his hole that blocked some of his lower face so the picture did not come out all that well.
Getting black background is not too difficult, especially with macro shot as long as there is no background nearby to reflect the light back. I tried to shoot up into water background and that helped also. The setting for the crinoid shrimp was F22, 1/160s .
It was easier with dSLR camera where you can use high F stop, low strobe power setting to light just the subject and not much beyond. With point and shoot camera, you are generally limited to F8-F11. When I used my Oly C5050, to get black background, I would be on F8 with shutterspeed around 1/2000s or so, ISO 64.
Most Burma liveaboard trip departs from Thailand. It is a nice alternative to just diving around the Similans or south Andaman Sea. Visibility generally is not as good as the Similans (except for Burma Bank where viz was around 30m+) but it has lots of macro stuffs, quite a bit of reefsharks in certain sites. However the trip is done by liveaboard only as all the sites a are quite a way away from mainland.
