Room For Improvement: A First Attempt at Underwater Photography, Sipadan

The visibility at Sipidan is often 30 meters plus, not that you can tell from my photos. These pictures are the results of my first go at underwater photography, a humbling, frustrating experience to say the least. Some of the things I learned from my rookie day:Fish are not photogenic. By the time you take out your camera and try to take a shot, the fish are swimming away and all you capture is a thin profile of their fin. When you can get a good side view, good luck asking the fish to stay still so you can capture a photo that is not blurred.The lighting is entirely different than taking photos on land. I don't even pretend to understand how to compensate yet. In my meager defense, I thought the camera I rented was a real piece of crap, but if I had had a top of the line camera I probably would have been even more frustrated since I wouldn't have an excuse for my poor pictures. Photography can potentially ruin diving. While an enormous school of barracuda was circling around the reef, I was trying to figure out the proper settings on the camera instead of enjoying witnessing it. It is very difficult to take a photo that really captures the experience of diving. Here I tried to snap a shot showing the abundance of fish at the drop off, hoping to catch the smaller, more colorful fish in the corals and the huge school of jack fish behind them. The outlines are there, but the colors, the life, the excitement of the reef is absent. Okay, I'm going to say this, then I'll stop complaining and whining about my photos. Above is a picture I took at Sipadan. Below is a picture someone else took at Sipadan. I just don't understand yet. I'm sure that one's doctored, but the diffence is vast. Still, I'm not giving up. Just need to get more diving in somehow.

A school of jack fish circles at the top of the drop off outside Turtle Tomb. I dove this same spot 3 times in my stay in Semporna and they were always there, swimming together. Some of the bigger fish in the middle of the school were nearly 2 meters long.A close-up of the jackfish. I doctored these shots a little trying to compensate for the off colors and lighting. Still looking up how to do that as well. What's Turtle Tomb? This is. Underneath Sipadan is a complex network of caves that are extremely dangerous to dive. It's possible, but very expensive. We swam into the cave 10 meters or so, just for effect. The name comes from the bones of ancient sea turtles found in the caves. Why they're there is a mystery but the two main theories are A. the turtles go there to die B. the turtles swim in, get lost and never find their way out. Here a parrot(?)fish sits on the sandy bottom of the entrance to the Turtle Tomb. So, I guess not all fish are scared of cameras.There really were turtles every where. These pictures are all of different turtles on different parts of the dives. There were so many per dive nobody pointed them out to each other. I couldn't keep track of how many we saw, but if I had to guess, I would say that on some of the dives we saw as many as 35 seperate turtles. Also, it's very faint, but there's a white tip shark blurred into the background of the top-left of the photo. At certain points in the dives the best I could do was count how many seperate turtles were visible at that very moment. The most I counted was 7 turtles around me, some swimming in the deep, some floating around the wall, and others resting amongst the coral on the reef. The reef sharks were just as numerous as the turtles. None of us even pointed them out. The DM started out the dives clanging on his tank to point out the first of the dive, but soon gave up as he didn't want to be playing his tank like an instrument throughout the dive. Probably the worst quality of all the pictures, but I still want to show what I tried to capture here. In the back there are many divers, all looking the same way, gazing at the huge school of barracuda. This school was truly amazing. There could have been as many as 1,000 barracuda all swimming together. If that is an exaggeration, it is only a slight one as there were so many you couldn't keep them all in your field of vision. This was at the, aptly named, Barracuda Point, the most famous dive site on Sipadan. I had been on this same site two times already and understood the lays of the reef and the currents. All the other divers were following the school around, fighting the current, increasing the heart rate, and sucking down air. I stayed put in one place, relaxing, breathing comfortably, just waiting for the fish to inevitably turn and circle closer to me. At that point, two white tip sharks cruised over, went right past me and headed for these divers. I tried my best to get a shot of the two sharks heading for the unsuspecting divers, but this was all that turned out. On any other dive site, people would have been excited to see a single shark all day. Here we were at Barracuda Point, and there were so many sharks, and so many other fish to look at in such huge quantity, that these sharks cruised right behind these people without notice.