With age, I tend to be far more conservative in my diving, but the walls at the dive sites on the Southern part of the Island, the amazing swim-throughs that sometime take you a little deeper than you would want or the occasional turtle, shark or ray that decides to show up at 100ft, when you've already started your ascent are many factors that can shatter even your best dive plans.  

I did not end up in the chamber this time around, so that's progress... 

This trip, organized by Underwater Colours with famous underwater photographer Bonnie Pelnar and guest videographer extraordinaire Walter Marti, was actually an underwater photo and video workshop and our boat was loaded everyday with a lot of camera gear. The central section of our big dive boat was fully occupied by expansive video and photo equipment that combined was probably more expensive than the boat itself. I called it the $100,000 table but I was most likely underestimating it a bit. Everyday I was almost expecting someone would show up with an IMAX rig with two REDs and six 10M lumen Kraken lights and we would have to unload a couple of divers to make room for this monstrosity, but we did not. Lucky.

The fun part is that I did not feel underequipped with my compact still/video rig. As Bonnie quoted Ansel Adams in her first introduction class, "The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!"

The nice thing about the workshop was that it forced me to try out new settings. I finally got a class on f/stops, ISOs and shutter speeds and even though I've watched countless YouTube videos and read a lot of articles about that, a live delivery with a few simple examples with almost immediate in-situation shoots helped quite a lot putting all that knowledge to good use.

So I set my ISO to 125 (the minimum my camera supports), my aperture to f/11 (the minimum my camera can do) and my shutter speed to 1/125s and went shooting some close ups macro kind of stuff. It actually worked pretty good. I turned my flash on on a few shots and my clarity and colors came out not too bad. I sometimes had to play with my f-stops in darker situations and I'm pretty sure that when my flash fires, my shutter speed defaults back to 1/60s, but all in all that was an interesting experience. I look forward testing these settings out on my local dives with crap viz and extreme surge.

On that trip we also had the opportunity to do blackwater dives. It's basically a dive in the middle of the channel between the island of Cozumel and Mexico mainland one hour at least after sunset with very powerful lights on a line to attract critters from the abyss. The dive is up to 90 minutes in at most 45ft of water, mostly between 10ft and 30ft. I ended my dive with 500lbs of air after 80 minutes and a few very weird encounters. I did not bother trying to shoot stills with my setup and I focused on video instead. The critters are quite small and will easily get in and out of focus as they move (or I move) in the water column. It was another interesting experience, but more like a bucket list item, it's checked, I don't think I'd do it again. I assembled a short video for the workshop's contest. It did not win. Bummer...  My mantis shrimp pic got an honorable mention I think, so there's that.