C&C Chilean fish portraits

[randini]

Here're a pair of fish portraits I took the other day in Punta de Tralca (central Chile, cool temperate green water - visibility was about 5-7m and both were taken in about 15m depth).

Taken with a Nikon coolpix P4 in a Fantasea housing with a Sea & Sea YS-60 & H-W digital adapter.

This first one, a Sole. The only PP was levels adjustment and some healing to clean up the background and some unsharpen mask.

This next one was a curious goby that kept following me around when I was trying to shoot a crab. He wouldn't stop posing (and almost smirking) until I took his picture. PP includes levels, some pretty heavy cropping and some healing tool to remove white blotches in the shadow behind the fish.

Comments/suggestions please.

 

[drbill]

Great to see pix of your local critters. I do hope to get down there and dive your kelp forests so I can create a video showing the similarities and differences between ours here, yours, Tasmanian and South African ones.

 

[paradicio]

Yes, definitely thanks for sharing would love to see some more!

 

[randini]

@DrBill, Well, come on down. I work at a marine lab & we have a couple of boats & sets of dive gear available to visiting researchers. One thing, the kelp forests aren't near what you have in CA.
@paradicio: Thanks. You asked for it...

OK, here are a few more. I know they're pretty bad photographically (C&C the two in the first post only, please), but to help give you an idea of what it's like here (the colors are terrible because my strobes decided not to work that day and I was having a hard time WB'ing in the current, plus my WA lens was fogging up on me).

At least in central Chile, most of our kelp forests look more like this:

but a more common lanscape is something like this:

that lot beneath the yellow sponge is actually purple and the yellow sponge is a much brighter yellow (I just couldn't get the colors to come out right).

Here's our version of the horn shark:

and one of our nudis:

yea, those are rock shrimp coming out from the back side of the boulder that the nudi's on. they look more like this and are EVERYWHERE (this picture's actually from a different day/site):

and we can't forget Austromegabalanus (the picture's also from a different day & site), the biggest barnacle in the world (this one's actually on the smaller side, it's only about 5 cm tall) :

and you do know what they say about barnacle allometry, right?

 

[paradicio]

Thanks randini, always a thrill to get to see kelp forests from other parts of the world! How deep were you on that first shot?

 

[randini]

You're welcome. I don't exactly remember, but probably about 40 feet. I just got back from that site where I did another dive today and was in the kelp forest from about 55 to 25 ft.