Key Largo Dive Pics

[npaden]

Thought I would share the pics of my recent trip to Key Largo.

We dove with www.Aqua-Nuts.com and had a great time. Most of the dives were really shallow and we were going to dive the Speigel Grove the last day but the currents were to strong so we dove French Reef instead.

Here is the link: http://padens.com/Florida_Diving/

And a couple of movie clips: http://padens.com/Florida_Diving/Movie_Clips

My pics are not anything special, more of a tourist "Hey look at what I saw" than anything but you can get a feel for the Florida reefs I think.

Hope you like them.

Nathan

 

[Dee]

Very nice! Your Grey and French Angel shots are great fish portraits.

If you don't mind, I have a few ID corrections, in order of appearance...your brown blue Tang is an Ocean Surgeonfish, the butterfly pair are Banded Butterflyfish, the camoflage fish, the clear one in the sand, is a Bridled Goby, the yellow and blue damsel is a Juv. Longfin Damsel, the pair of butterflies are Foureye Butterflyfish, parrotfish and parrotfish2 is a Stoplight Parrotfish, your pipefish are all Trumpetfish, scroll filefish is a Scrawled filefish...almost right!, the stingray is a Southern Stingray, the 'one that got away' is a Nassau Grouper, your unknown coral is Ridged Cactus Coral.

Thanks for posting them!

 

[SeaYoda]

Enjoyed your pictures very much, thanks for posting.

 

[Gilligan]

Nice photos. My favorite is the Barracuda

 

[fins]

Thanks for posting the pics...like Gilligan I really like the barracuda

 

[DennisW]

Very nice. Dee has the ID's perfect. The Benwood is one of my favorite dives.

 

[npaden]

Dee, I had a long reply typed out touting the merits of using scientific names for proper ID of fish and corals rather than common names but I wiped it out by accident. My names were meant to be descriptive of the fish or corals and not to be used for true identification purposes. Hence the camoflauge fish description is more of a description of how well the fish blends into the sand and not an attempt to identify it as a Coryphopterus glaucofraenum and the one that got away was an attempt to describe the hook in the Epinephelus striatus's mouth. I will update the "Brown Blue Tang" description though as I was told by the Dive Operators that they only had one species of Surgeonfish in the Keys and that the Brown Tangs were just Juvinille Blue Tangs. I knew that Blue Tangs were Yellow as Juvinille's but thought that the Brown might just be an adolescent phase even though some of the Brown Tangs were larger than the Blue ones.

Thanks for the compliments on the pics. I just try to take pics of interesting stuff down there more from an underwater tourist point of view than trying to win any photography awards.

This was my second ocean diving experience with the first being in Fiji last year. I had lowered my expectations significantly of what the Keys were going to be like so I was pleasantly suprised. Hard corals were few and far between and those that were there were not in very good shape. I think that is why the artificial reefs programs are so popular because if you give the soft corals something to settle on they seem to do really well.

I took all the pictures with an Olympus 5050Z in 20 to 40 feet of water without a strobe and for the most part without a flash at all. Visibility was good for the Keys from what I understand, probably averaging 25' or so for the 4 days we were diving.

The key to taking good underwater pics IMO is to use a digital camera and use adobe photoshop use the autolevels feature. It takes a bluish drab picture and instantly transforms it to pretty much what you saw when you were down there. I have no idea how it does it but it works great. Every once in a while it gets it wrong but most of the time it works perfect.

Thanks for the kind words.

Nathan

 

[Jetwrench]

Nice pics, Nathan! The french angel is very nice. And, I'm always partial to cuda shots.

 

[Dee]

Dee, I had a long reply typed out touting the merits of using scientific names for proper ID of fish and corals rather than common names but I wiped it out by accident. My names were meant to be descriptive of the fish or corals and not to be used for true identification purposes. Hence the camoflauge fish description is more of a description of how well the fish blends into the sand and not an attempt to identify it as a Coryphopterus glaucofraenum and the one that got away was an attempt to describe the hook in the Epinephelus striatus's mouth. I will update the "Brown Blue Tang" description though as I was told by the Dive Operators that they only had one species of Surgeonfish in the Keys and that the Brown Tangs were just Juvinille Blue Tangs. I knew that Blue Tangs were Yellow as Juvinille's but thought that the Brown might just be an adolescent phase even though some of the Brown Tangs were larger than the Blue ones.

I'm sorry if you took offense. The names you had assigned to your pictures were very similar to those used by folks who haven't learned fish ID's yet. As for using scientific names, I don't use them here on the board because most people only know the common names and have no desire to learn the scientific names.

So pardon me all to hell for trying to be helpful to you. You can be sure it won't happen again.

 

[npaden]

So pardon me all to hell for trying to be helpful to you. You can be sure it won't happen again.

WOW! I'm sorry that you obviously took offense! Holy Cow!

I didn't feel that my reply regarding the ID's was any different in tone than your initial reply correcting my original descriptions but I guess I was wrong there.

Excuse me.