A short Eilat trip with Matan and Alon

Due to complex set of reasons Matan, my old time dive buddy, did not dive for almost six months. On the first opportunity to correct this, we took off to Eilat for a weekend. Alon joined us to complete the merry team.

The water in Eilat was quite cloudy with uncharistically bad visibility. The remains of the algae that bloomed in the winter were still visible. In some places they formed webs of dead materials that served as a shelter and food source to many small creatures.

On this occasion I brought with me several DYI gadgets for creative lighting. Most notable was a ring flash. This gadget uses optic fibers to make a ring of light around the lens. This particularly useful for close subjects that hard to illuminate. While the other gadgets were disappointing (and need to be revamped) this one worked quite nicely.

And if you are curious about the contraption:

To see it in action note the reflection on the eye of this very small fish.

On a night dive we bumped on a sandy area full of these dead algae and many nudibranches all over them. Sadly due to stuck zoom ring and empty batteries I had only poor images of them and so we will need to rectify this in the future :-(

The next morning the sun came out a bit and things were looking better. I decided to go back to old fashioned gadget-less photography for a bit.

On a deep dive next to the IUI we run onto a large lobster. These are usually hiding during the day and are uncommon. This fellow was very big and did not mind being photographed.