About

From these photos, I made Sai Kung Underwater, a coffee table book of free-diving photos taken in Hong Kong's Sai Kung area. The ideas being:

• Sharing underwater scenery of Sai Kung accessible to swimmers
• Promoting awareness for the protection of the Sai Kung underwater environment.

This initiative is a personal hobby-project to get outdoors more with friends.

This web site (www.saikung.fish -- now fish.bezy.cc because I forgot to pay for the URL ... ) is my searchable dumping ground for photos as I select some for the book.

It is difficult to take a good photo of a fish and many of these photos are poor-quality reminders to myself about the “fish that got away, when and where… “; so I can go back and take a better picture later.

“So long, and thanks for all the fish.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Thanks to all the fish ( the flora and fauna ) that posed for my photos. My mom is a curious birdwatcher. As I grow to recognize many Sai Kung fish individually and become more familiar with their personalities and habits it is similar to how my mom "knows her birds". Overwhelming is the common behaviors of fish, birds and other animals and people. For example, Clown Fish are the junk yard dogs of the anemone and a Moon Wrasse is a tease who will play almost as coy as a Blackeye Thicklip. Different groups of fish will dominate an area of coral at different times similar to how species of birds dominate my mom's bird feeder according to their schedule.

Downloads

Please feel welcome to re-use any of these images.

The 'Download' button accessible from the 'Image / Share menu' will download a high-resolution watermark free image as opposed to just saving the lower resolution image from the webpage.

Tools used

To make these photos I used an Olympus TG-6 waterproof point & shoot camera without a housing or anything expensive. I went to these locations on my paddle board and diving with just snorkel, mask, fins, and rocks in my pockets. I sometimes miss using tanks and a boat, but I guess without these it is easier to avoid damaging coral or scaring fish. Getting acceptable photos out of the TG-6 was initially a learning curve. The key settings used are: RAW files, fixed ‘sunny day’ white balance, fixed shutter speed, variable ISO. In Adobe Lightroom ‘batch settings’ are applied to re-adjust contrast and white-balance using as grey-color reference point a sandy bottom (a sandy seafloor, not a sandy bum).

This web site is created with The Turning Gate's Backlight with Lightroom plugin. I have used The Turning Gate since 2008 and it is an awesome time-saver enabling photos to be quickly shared with minimal geeking around on computers.

Thanks

• Thanks to Hong Kong 114E Reef Fish Survey: it is the most useful resource to identify and learn about this ecology. (see 'Links')
• Thanks to those who also dive and enjoy. Encouragement and collaboration are wonderful things.

 

Stay safe and happy swimming,

Bill Bezy