Shark Dive- Cara a Cara

After my day of fumbling around with macro I set myself up for wide. I was also signed up to go on the shark dive, so macro wouldn’t help me very much. Because this whole week is a competition I had this dream of taking a photo of the sharks using a slow shutter speed with second curtain strobe. A fancy way of saying a motion blur shot with the shark in focus. Unfortunately for me the Canon system I was shooting couldn’t do second curtain with the strobes I had so I went to the demo gear crew the night before and asked to set me up for the shot I wanted. They asked how many dives I’d done with sharks and said it was my first. The demo crew told me it was ballzy to shoot my first shark dive with a slow shutter speed. But I wanted to get an image that no one else was going to take, that I could call my own.

We arrived at Cara a Cara, or face to face, the prime spot to get up close and personal with Caribbean reef sharks. We climbed down the mooring line to a small sandy patch in 70 fsw next to a short reef wall about 12 feet tall I got a spot in the middle and got my camera ready for some slow shutter speed shots. I waited patiently as the sharks swam by to start shooting. I began to notice a pattern that the sharks would swim out then almost directly into me and turn right in front of me. So I waited for certain sharks with hooks in their mouth, distinctive patterns or interesting behavior to swim by me and I would fire off three or four shots and adjust my settings accordingly. After an hour underwater we started to head back up the line. About half way up the line I again threw up without any warning. Bobbing up and down on the safety stop didn’t help much either and I kept getting sick. Once on the boat I continued to get sick all the way back to the docks. But it was all worth it because I got some amazing shots that no one else took that I will always be proud of.