I spent my safety stop swimming around on top of a shallow reef. Found another pink skunk clownfish hanging out in an anemone! As I swam around, in the distance I spotted...
Profile shot sans flash (which is why the colors are less vibrant). Right after I snapped this photo, I heard a my divemaster frantically banging his tank with his dive knife. Since you can't speak underwater, if you want to get someone's attention, you usually will bang something metal (a carabiner, a dive knife, etc). It took me a while to locate where the sound was coming from (sound travels differently through water and it makes it impossible for humans to use their two ears to pinpoint the source of a sound), so I was slowly turning around scanning to see what he wanted to show me, and as I turned around I found myself face to face with a very large, very angry, male, Titan triggerfish!
Triggerfish as usually harmless, but their very territorial and if you swim through the "cone" that they consider theirs, they raise a fin on their back that points at you, signaling that they are about to attack. When they do this, you simply swim on your back and kick your fins at them as you swim out of their territory. Usually, a triggerfish will take a half-hearted nip at your fish and then swim away.
But not this guy! After surprising me, I barely had time to get my fins up in front of me before his first chomp. As he circled around for another go at me, I kept swimming away as fast as I could. He made three or four more passes at me, biting my fins each time! I swam over next to my dive master and despite the fact that we were now at least a hundred meters away from his territory, he was still attacking us! My divemaster was equally perflexed and after the 10th or 11th attack, we both decided to cut our dive short by 10 minutes or so and surface.
But if you have the proper filters on your lens, or if you use Photoshop (like I do) to filter out some of the blue light, the rest of the colors magically emerge and then your photos look identical to what the human eye sees while underwater. Check out these awesome Pink Skunk Clownfish hiding out in their little anemone nest!
The deeper underwater you go, the more the colors change because the colors that have shorter wavelengths get filtered out by the water. So when you take photos down deep, they tend to look very blue and washed out.
