About the site
I’ve been talking a lot about cave diving recently…because that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing. I rectified that this weekend with two lovely dives out in the Bay. The wreck of the Ozone lies very close to shore and half out of the water at Indented Head, on the Bellarine Peninsula. I waded out towards the isolated danger marker and the struts of the wreck sticking up, and I reckon there were only a few times during the “dive” where I wouldn’t have been able to stand up. The hull stretches out flat on the sand and then there’s a few sticky-up bits down one end.
About the dive
After a lovely dive on Lonsdale Wall in the morning, this was a late afternoon dive. I swapped from my wide angle lens to my macro lens intended to try a few different things with the strobes. Being nice and shallow was handy for a clear head and lots of time to play around.
Despite the flat seas being just 50m off the sandy shore made for sandy vis – as you would expect. The larger fish were remarkably nervous. A school of old wives lapped around to see me several times, each time fleeing at the first bubbles. The wreckage is fairly weedy and I meandered my way around and peered into the nooks and crannies looking for critters with limited success. The second shot here shows the little sand-dwelling fish that sit up on their fins and watch you. As the sunlight started to drop off I considered giving up the hunt for anything more than weed to practise on. And then I swam around the back of the boiler to find rows and rows of holes.
About the shot
Each hole in the boiler had its own tiny inhabitant. There were a couple of small fish who backed into the dark and glared at me. There were little red urchins in a lot of them. But the rest had shrimp, one per hole, sitting in the entrances and waving their front legs around. It was a great way to practise macro lighting with the boiler providing a natural snoot and plenty of subjects to choose from.
The shot up top was taken with one strobe only, pulled back and pointed directly at the barrel of my port on the right hand side. I’m close enough to the face of the boiler that the light has hit it and bounced back, giving a more diffuse light on the subject. I prefer this shot to many of the others because I got close enough to fill the frame – this one is uncropped. Getting shrimp in focus can be challenging as they’re too angular capture in a thin plane of focus. After experimenting at f2.8 and failing to get enough light down the hole at f18, this shot worked with just the right depth of field at f9.
Cool photos