Red Sea Diving: Videos Showing Actual Reef Conditions

[Sure Squintsalot]

When researching potential dive sites, I'm often frustrated by the lack of detailed overview videos of dive conditions at that site. If videos exist at all, they might be 3 minutes of crappy stick-held GoPro footage or glorious professionally produced "Best-of" clips complete with drone shots and sea life (likely represented by big league Hollywood agents).

I didn't set out to shoot these videos with the intent of using them as a "record of conditions". I shot them to:

1. Record what I mostly saw and remember the experience of having been there, usually in front of a big screen, on the sofa with a nice beer.
2. Record things that I might have missed during the dive. I'm often astonished at the things I hadn't noticed while distracted by stupid stuff like safety, buddies, not breaking the reef, and other nonsense like resurfacing.
3. Learn, at my considerable leisure, all about these dive sites. Since I can't afford a suite of personal marine scientists to dive with me, I'll use these videos as a starting point to identifying sea life, behaviors, reef morphology, and local ecology.

A little bit of generic music helps fill the aural gap as there is no narration, though I'd like to do that with future videos synthesizing the interesting stuff with call-outs and captions. That these videos might be useful to anyone contemplating visiting these sites makes me super happy, but is entirely coincidental. I'll periodically update this thread with links to new videos as I process them.







Do you have similar videos for Red Sea locations? Please post your links below.

 

[Sure Squintsalot]

 

[Sure Squintsalot]

 

[Tippytoes12]

Wow, great videos ! What settings did you use on your GoPro and what lighting please ? Did you use the slow motion function ? I forget what it is called !

Thanks

 

[LI-er]

Nice videos. Please stay off the bottom. Stuff grows there, stuff lives there, it's bad form and not necessary.

 

[Sunn]

nice videos... but not many fishes left...

 

[MB NZ]

nice videos... but not many fishes left...

There's a lot of fish in the Red Sea, but what is noticeably absent is larger fish. It's been like that since I started diving there in 1999. I don't know whether that's the natural balance of the environment or due to over-fishing. On the plus side, the coral seems to be doing well.

 

[Sure Squintsalot]

Wow, great videos ! What settings did you use on your GoPro and what lighting please ? Did you use the slow motion function ? I forget what it is called !

Thanks! I use a pretty simple set-up: A GoPro9, and 2 video lights. I record in basic, wide angle 4K/60fps with none of the GoPro in-camera enhancements. I process in DaVinci Resolve where I slow down the timeline to 30 fps, then export the edited timeline to 60fps; the output appears half speed, but also much smoother, so I don't get sea-sick from watching my own videos. If these videos look OK it's largely because I take a lot of care in dynamically adjusting white balance and brightness/contrast of each clip during post processing (8 separate controls).

 

[Sunn]

There's a lot of fish in the Red Sea, but what is noticeably absent is larger fish. It's been like that since I started diving there in 1999. I don't know whether that's the natural balance of the environment or due to over-fishing. On the plus side, the coral seems to be doing well.

Exact. I think it's over-fishing... tourists want to eat fish... Have you seen many fishes larger than 30 cm ? They have nearly disapeared !