I was over in the Philippines recently doing some nice diving in Dumaguete. This area has some good macro and muck diving at sites around the main Dumaguete harbor. Nearby is Apo island – a protected national park that provides some nice reef diving when you get tired of the muck and macro, or want to see more than 30ft. The reef area along the island was kind of smashed up in January 2012 by a typhoon, so there were way fewer critters than in the past. We were there about 6 weeks after the typhoon and things were beginning to repopulate the damaged areas. The sea grass beds were hit quite hard, but are beginning to emerge from the sand and I hope it will look better soon.

We saw a fair number of these Nembrotha during our visit and they are really quite a spectacular creature to find with their bright orange rhinophores.

Some species of nudibranch have evolved defense mechanisms that rely on using features they get from the things they feed on. This nembrotha feeds on ascidians (tunicates and sea squirts) and can absorb toxins from its prey. It will release a defensive mucus that continas these toxins when disturbed.

I was up at Mono Lake in the Fall of 2011 and had a couple of wonderful days photographing in the area. It’s become a photo mecca for workshops at that time of year so the area around South Tufa can get busy at times, but the scenery and light is worth it. In the morning and late afternoons the light changes and shifs rapidly, providing photographers with an extrodinary variable landscape. Here are a couple of images from South Tufa showing different parts of the lake and variation in the light and clouds.

Sitting on the Ile de la Cite in the center of Paris, Notre Dame is an iconic part of the city. In the Summer the Paris days are long and it doesn’t begin to get dark until close to 11pm. I waited for the late dusk night to settle in before taking the images below. I scouted a few places that I wanted to try and photograph from during the day and found an area with several different views that I wanted to explore. At dusk the sky usually turns blue and this day, although there were some light clouds the blue light came through in the final images. The Gothic architecture of the building is quite stunning, it reminds me of Canterbury Cathedral where I went to school, with its amazing flying buttresses and gorgeous stained glass windows.

I found this colorful mixture of rocks and peblles while strolling around Pt Lobos State park after a storm. The pebbles had been thrown over the rocks and caught in some of the ledges and nooks worn into the sandstone and composite rocks. Within a few days enough folks will have wandered around and displaced these stones but right after a storm you can find some interesting still lifes.

Taken with a Nikon D200, Nikon 105 Macro. f2.8, Processed with Photoshop CS5.
© Jon Bertsch

Here are a couple of images of a blue ring octopus taken on a dive at Dumaguete, in the Philippines in April. My wife and I were cruising over a somewhat unlikely area of sand and small rocks, with very few areas of life. She spotted this guy peeking out from a small rock and we followed it around for 10 minutes or so. This is possibly the greater blue-ringed octopus, Hapalochlaena lunulata, but it’s hard to be certain. It’s always wonderful to see these critters and we were lucky to run it on the dive. They live on small crustaceans and paralyze their prey with a toxin that is injected, they are also extremely poisonous to humans so watch but do not touch them.

Another underwater gem is the Pegasus sea moth. These are found in the Indian Ocean around Indonesia and the Philippines, usually in fairly shallow waters. You tend to find them most often at night but they are regularly seen during the day in Lembeh and this one was taken during the day in the Philippines. They tend to travel in pairs, so look out for the second one once you find one, and try to put your hand on it or even worse crush it. The hardest thing is to get a decent portrait of them because they tend to shy away (understandably) from the huge photographer, camera system and bright flashes of the strobes. Nonetheless, with some pre-focusing and a little patience it’s possible. Hope you enjoy another mystery from the oceans.

© Jon Bertsch
Taken with a Nikon D200, Nikon 105mm, f14, 1/60th.
Ikelite housing, macro port, with DS-125 strobes. Processed with Photoshop CS5.

I was up visiting Lassen National Park a while ago and while on a hike I noticed this old weathered fallen tree. As I was walking around it, looking at the patterns of the growth rings, I noticed this area of interesting whorls. The tree was a white-blue-grey color, and sitting in the heavy shade it had a slight bluish tint to it. I set up a shot with my tripod and tried a few different angles. This was my favorite shot of the series.

I started a series of botanical studies in black and white (BW) for a new project. I take lot of plant and flower images from our garden and at the local botanical gardens but I don’t tend to post them very often. I started looking at creating some BW styles from them and decided to focus on making small set out of them. These are all processed in photoshop with the silver Efex Pro plugin.