Curacao
CURAÇAO
CURAÇAO YARNS
The entire reason that Tito and I took up scuba diving in the first place was to get inspired, and to design and dye new and unique yarns. We got a lot more than we signed up for, but my objectives underwater (outside of safety and being a good dive buddy) are the same as they are above water; get inspired, and take photos.
Freshwater diving here in Southern Ontario is pretty amazing, to be honest. We have lots of shipwrecks (a good thing, in this context?) Tobermory is awesome.
But we still jump at a chance to go warm water diving, and to see new and salty creatures :) So a chance to go to Curaçao with some of our closest friends and dive buddies was an easy sell.
Tito and I both shoot with something called the Kraken underwater sports housing. It allows us to take our phones to depth. I can shoot RAW with my phone, and it's a great, affordable alternative for anyone who isn't ready to invest in underwater housing for a DSLR camera.
This fellow on the left is not a spider :) It's an arrowhead crab hanging out in some coral! He didn't make the shortlist for dyeing because I felt the colours were too close to an existing colourway; Eventide.
I shot over 2000 images that week, and only seven made the short list for yarns. I also completed my deep certification, diving to 130 ft, along with Tito. Yay us!
This sweet little thing on the right is called a "Peacock Tailed Anemone Shrimp" which is quite a mouthful :) We shortened it to "Anemone Shrimp" for the yarn.
One of my favourite things about shooting underwater is how the colours are hiding from you unless they're lit properly, and /or carefully post-processsed. Colour disappears as you go deeper, eventually becoming just blue. You can tell by looking at the before and after photos below.
Speaking of purple and yellow... another colour combo I didn't think folks would love, but the ocean is rife with this combo! Check this pretty thing out!
For those who are interested, I process using Lightroom initially. I set my neutral gray, which usually gives me a decent idea of where the other colours should lie. A big part of it is memory; I try to process until the image looks the way it did to me on the dive. Sometimes I will pull up images online of the animal to make sure I'm getting it right.
When I can, without causing distress to the wildlife, I will use artificial dive lights to assist with eliminating that blue. you have to be careful not to shine the lights directly into creatures eyes, they don't like it any more than we would :)
ANEMONE SHRIMP
Very tiny, and found on a night shoot, this little critter was hanging out in ... an anemone (big surprise, right?). He was the last colour developed, and almost didn't make the cut because I already had a purple that I really loved, but sometimes a photo is so good you have to make it work!
POSEIDON
A huge thank you to my dive buddies! Tito is my perma dive-buddy, but Jason (background) and Steve (foreground) are my diving besties. The boys let me use this shot for a yarn that I wanted to simply demonstrate the endless, deepening blue that makes scuba so relaxing and appealing to me.
BRAIN CORAL
This is a photo that I likely could have processed even more, to bring out the yellows and taupes that folks often associate with brain corals., but sometimes under processing just a little is nice. As shown in the images above, you can get some pretty intense blue-greens in the pre-processed image, and I chose to retain some of that because TURQUOISE (yeah, you know me).
HERMIT CRAB
A h, the mighty hermit crab. Adorable, shy, and living the life of a champion. Anyone who can walk around with what is OBVIOUSLY someone else's house on their back with zero concerns is a hero of mine. It's like an egregious hat; all you need to rock it, is attitude.
It's time to hit the dye stations so I'm going to stop here! If you've made it this far, congratulations, you get to know that all the December yarns, and all the clubs are looking to ship starting Monday :) Also here is an above-water pic of three elusive land sharks.
