A Young Man's Fancy Turns To...?

[dwashbur]

...Laying Eggs, apparently! Monday, 8-11-08, we found no less than four kinds of nudibranchs laying eggs. At the breakwater we found the giant dendronotid, Dendronotus iris:

Add to that the Noble Sea Lemon, Peltodoris nobilis (look closely under the edge of the upper one):

as well as the Leopard Dorid, Diaulula sandiegensis:

While at the Metridium field, we found this lovely Hilton's aeolid, Phidiana hiltoni, just beginning an egg ribbon of its own:

If this is any indication, there should be a nice crop of new nudibranchs soon enough!

 

[marcus8]

Lovely shots. What type of camera setup are you using?

Thx

Mark

 

[drbill]

Too much sex for an old geezer like me... even though my ancient brain turns to thoughts of the same thing as you youngsters! Nice pix, but I prefer catching nudis "in the act" so to speak. Just teasing ya.

 

[dwashbur]

Lovely shots. What type of camera setup are you using?

Thx

Mark

Those 4 were taken with my old Pentax Optio S5i using the built-in flash. Nothing fancy. The case is Pentax's O-WP2. The camera is only a 5 megapixel, but I've gotten used to it enough to get a fair bit out of it. Sometimes one of us will provide a little extra illumination with our dive lights, but I believe that was only done for the giant dendro shot in this group.

 

[marcus8]

nice tight shots. Looks like she focuses pretty well up close.

 

[dwashbur]

Well, yes and no. I keep it in macro mode all the time, but in that mode I can't get any closer than 8 inches. It does have a "super macro" mode that can get down to about 1-2 inches, but in that mode the flash doesn't function. However, I have the image resolution set as high as it can go, 2560x1920, which compensates for a lot and gives me a lot of room to crop things in Photoshop. My wife's Casio Exilim Z1050 and my daughter's (currently broken) Canon A630 can both focus as close as about half an inch in macro mode, but I enjoy seeing what I can get this little fellow to do.