Both sea stars on the right (pin cushion sea star on top, granulated sea star on bottom) and the coral on the left look as if they were made by children from play dough, yet they are real. Also if you inspect the fine texture of the animals’ surface you can see they were not […]

  On this picture my son Adam is leaving the surface and descending through the blue water to inspect coral gardens of South Pacific in Vava’u archipelago, Kingdom of Tonga. In general he is not a very keen diver or snorkeler, especially in our temperate waters around New Zealand. However, in the warm waters of […]

After two hours of snorkeling and freediving  around Tongan Beach Resort I got exhausted. Remember, I was pushing my housed Nikon D300 with two big Ikelite strobes through the water all that time. I pulled myself onto the wharf, removed my mask and was ready to take off my wetsuit when I heard my son’s […]

The ocean around Swallow’s Cave in Vava’u archipelago attracted our attention by its incredibly blue clear water and vertical walls right from the island’s shores but we were quite disappointed by the amount of coral growth. Corals were scarce, small and often broken. Then on the edge of visibility it appeared. A massive piece, way […]

This block of coral in shallow water reminds me of a science-fiction three-dimensional city. In movies people use flying machines, in the ocean it’s not necessary. Fish and other critters which inhabit the coral block can move vertically with the same ease as when they move horizontally. They leave the city to find food but […]

For some reason I haven’t been photographing Clown nudibranches (Ceratosoma amoena) for about a year. Today it was there, shining on a vertical rock in the shade of the kelp canopy. I had my camera with me and, surprisingly, a macro lens on it (see my previous post on spring opportunities). I could not resist. […]