Honorable Mention Portrait

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"Eye Contact"

The Story:

There is a place in the Philippines named Kimud Shoal, where you can meet perhaps the most beautiful shark in the world in a natural environment. This shark is the thresher shark, which mainly decimates schools of mackerel, herring and sardines. It swims around shoals of herring and sardines, striking the water with its long tail fin that sounds far away. After having gathered the fish in this way, he swims among them and drops prey from the crowd. At this dive site there is a small coral reef surrounded by hundreds of meters of depth. At dawn, after they have finished hunting, they swim up above the reef, where the cleaner fish remove the parasites from their skin. For 10 days, we sailed out every early morning to this point, where I studied the sharks' behavior and habits. I managed to take this picture after several hours of diving, of the shark circling above the cleaning station. I didn't use an external flash when taking the picture, just natural light so as not to disturb the shark. This made my job very difficult, because the light and visibility under the water are poor in this area early in the morning.

Location:

Kimud Shoal - Philippines

Equipment Used:

• Subal UW house
• Subal Dom port. Canon R5 camera
• with canon fisheye 8-15mm. No strobes.

Camera Settings:

• f/11 
• 1/200s 
• ISO 640