Todd Winner’s Wednesday Photo – Skeleton Shrimp

Todd Winner’s Wednesday Photo – Skeleton Shrimp

Feb 06

Image and text by: Todd Winner

One of the things I love about macro and supper macro is being able to show a subject in a way you never could with the naked eye. In fact, many of our super macro subjects can hardly be seen without magnification. We often catch some of these subjects in our normal macro shots only to discover them when viewing the image on a large screen. (Photography bycatch.) It can be quite a challenge to find and photograph these tiny creatures especially without cropping into the image in post. Below are the tools and techniques that helped me get the skeleton shrimp shot.

Tools & Techniques

First you have to be able to see the subject. On my housing I use the Nauticam 180 viewfinder. This gives me a big bright view of my subject for critical focus. I used the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS lens on a Canon 7D body. This lens will focus down to 1×1 but for extra magnification I added a SubSea +10 diopter. Using one of the flip holders like the Nauticam M67 can make using these diopters much more convenient. For lighting, I used 2 Ikelite 160 strobes and to help with focusing I had a Light and Motion Sola 600.  I noticed a number of skeleton shrimp on a yellow-orange tunicate. To separate the subject from the background, I aimed slightly up and waited for one to walk across the top. The +10 diopter gives you a very shallow depth of field so the soft out of focus area behind the shrimp has a nice bokeh effect even though it is not very far from the subject. Finally in Lightroom I added some vibrance, clarity and a small vignette to direct the viewer to the subject. Super macro can be a great way to spend a dive and best of all you probably won’t even have to swim far from the boat!