I’ve noticed a few posts on underwater photography, but I haven’t seen any on the topic of actually observing species and tips on how to do it.
My favourite hobbies are observing creatures on land and underwater. But those are vastly different experiences and require different sets of skills. So, divers around the world, how do you usually find the marine life you look for (random chance, actively looking at macro habitats, relying on your guide, etc.)?
When abroad, rely a lot on the guide to spot them (roughly 75% of the species I encounter), but for some of them, I learnt to know where to look. For instance, I have a habit of checking closely every algae suitable for seahorses, which I know might have raised suspicions of narcosis to buddies more than once. Some rocky formations (small caves the size of shoebox) are ideal spots for lobsters and mantis. And rays love to rest in small openings between the rock/coral and the sandy bottom, rather than the open sand.
These kind of observations tips are what I’d like to share. What do you think?
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@DitchingIt and Peter @pmeisenheimer, did you see this thread?
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@AdamWargon, I think that the link got broken somehow, and I can’t find the thread that you intended. Maybe do a repost for the peanut gallery? 
(EDITED) Okay, I clearly rolled a crit fumble on reading comprehension. You were tagging @DitchingIt. Derp. 
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One tip that doesn’t appeal so much to hardcore photographers is ro be clear from the outset about whether you’re photographing or observing. If you’re observing, job one ia getting an image that permits identification as opposed to looking for that National Geographic/Freeman Paterson image. Some of my observations are based on images that might embarrass someone with social awareness or whatever it is that causes people to blush.
When you have a destination picked out, pick three subjects as targets. It really doesn’t matter how you pick them. If you get them all, yay. I often select rare stuff, invasive stuff, endemic stuff, weird looking stuff, weirdly named stuff, etc. etc…
Always check your battery level. Always check your memory space. Always bring a spare battery. Always bring a spare memory card. Yeah, yeah, of course, eh? A friend of mine went to the Zimbabwe side of Victoria Falls, which is an absolutely gorgeous sight, and arrived with no battery power. He had skipped over from the Zambian side, which doesn’t have quite as spectacular a view, and only had a couple of hours so no award winning images for him.
If you’re diving on a group charter, be sure to tell the divemaster(s) that you’re after images of living things and tell them your three (or whatever) targets for the dive. If they deliver, tip; they will remember you kindly next time.
If you’re managing your own dives, just do the homework before you get there.
Good topic. I’m interested in what others have to say.
EDITED fr tupoe i hve fst thmns.
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Hopefully some more divers can chime in and add their tips.
Thanks for the tag @adamwargon. Yes I saw the question but felt a bit overwhelmed by it at the time. Peter’s answer is a great approach. Having been directly solicited, I am happy to offer something too.
- Match equipment with objectives, opportunities and safety: Don’t focus on macro or high quality if you can’t stay still or highly localised for much of the dive.
- Have a main mode preplanned based on what you can or can’t affect in advance or (e.g. macro, wide-angle, video, low quality ID-harvesting). Be able to operate all parameters of that mode by touch as far as possible.
- Don’t be afraid to return to sites regularly; familiarity will bring rewards as will novel exploration.
- There will always be frustratingly missed opportunities. Be a bit Zen about it: if you are in a macro mode as the sea snake swims past you to the surface, just watch and relish rather than fight to reconfigure your equipment. Or if you have a wide angle set up for a wreck and discover awful visibility, take some fish-eye close ups but otherwise just enjoy looking at the sponges you’ve never taken time for.
- Life will only happen once. Take and make opportunities to do one thing well: I started out with a 36‐negative un-housed Nikonos SLR camera and single slaved flash on an arm. I wasn’t after IDs but just 5 or 6 pictures that looked presentable. On an island day out boat tour, that was my ration for the day! Composition became absolutely critical. For my most productive years, living by the sea in Borneo, I had a cheap Olympus in a housing with only a 500mb memory card and a flash that often failed. I used a clip-on macro on a string and took what I could get. Site familiarity became my watch-words, and cultivating helpful links with guides and potential buddies so I could stay focused even in tourist groups. I learned to ration myself to photographing fishes I didn’t recognise to increase my ID list. Recognising I was getting older and SCUBA diving isn’t going to be medically safe for me for ever, let alone affordable, my last few years of diving focused on future ID-harvesting: using a Go-Pro Hero I shot numerous dives on a continuous 25 frames per second, mounted on a telescopic stick with torch, pointing it at fishes and into crevices etc. I hope eventually to analyse it and break out frames for interesting IDs. It may sound melancholic, but I’m actually banking up IDs for a future when I’m not so able to get around: it’s something to look forward to so long as at least one of the multiple memory bank copies remains uncorrupted.
- Persist. Persist. Persist. If you can’t afford good equipment and aren’t a very good photographer (both are me par example), think of your kit and method just as tools for something else you can do, like IDing or becoming a locality expert/ guide.
- And cultivate your networks. Become known for being useful for one thing. Make a small legacy for yourself. I was able to author and coauthor some scientific articles. You could be the iNat go-to for Caribbean gobies. You’ll find it more satisfying than flailing around wishing you could be and do everything well and never arriving anywhere.
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Interesting question. We basically live on a sailboat, now several years in the Pacific. In places not often visited (eg Tuvalu and Kiribati) I was advised to take photos of “everything”, which is what I’ve tended to do, which has extended the range of various species, first obs for all sorts of random things. However, most of our time has been in Fiji, but not generally near known dive hotspots. Recently, having been overwhelmed by taking “too many photos” and it becoming a chore to upload with not necessarily much scientific benefit, I have started to ask myself this question while diving: “What are you not seeing?” instead of being distracted by the moving fish, etc. It might be tiny things, camouflaged things, things I haven’t seen before, hermit crabs in a tiny shell. I am no way a great photographer but sometimes I take shots for the beauty or to record the general location or don’t just crop them down to the minimal size for ID. What I love about diving is that there is always something of interest!
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Good advice, thanks for sharing!
I actually have decided few years ago to sacrifice good photography as I was feeling I was missing a lot for the lack of being in the moment or just to focus on the picture instead of the creature. Being zen is surprisingly harder than what we can sometimes think of.
I also indeed appreciate going back to familiar diving sites, as with known hiking trails. One can look at things with less of a sense of surprise and more with a naturalist curiosity!
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I agree on “taking too many photos” although I’m guilty of that. My pictures are mostly to allow me to identify and document that animal and sometimes some gorgeous creatures are too tempting to leave it only to memory.
Living on a sailboat is a very interesting situation for this topic. Since you have a very large panel of choice where to go and which “site” to choose, which elements do you consider in this choice?
Do you go with some “target” species or biomes?
On the sailboat, our choices are limited in different ways from other folks, mainly weather-related including where to spend cyclone season, slow speed of travel, visas, and so on.
On a more immediate basis, we have to have somewhere safe to anchor the big boat for whatever weather we are expecting within the next few days. Then our dive range is usually within 5km of that point by dinghy, not 40km which it might be on a commercial boat. If the weather outside the bay is too rough for the dinghy, we might just drop off the back and explore what is on the floor of the bay or the shallow fringing reef. We will often just snorkel shallows to see what is there, get some exercise and cool down! Sometimes we will work our way along a reef over several days, starting each dive a bit further than the last one.
Because we are almost always on our own, we need to be able to get back to the dinghy at the end of the dive as opposed to having a boat on the surface come to pick you up wherever you pop up. I don’t like high current for this reason. Though occasionally we will do a drift dive through a pass, hanging onto ropes from the dinghy which drifts with us.
We are very rarely at named dive sites.
You ask about target species - my husband is obsessed by Ctenoides ales, Electric File Clams, so we often dive very dusty, silty sites, conditions they seem to like, whereas I love it when we can get to clear water outer reef.
It’s a great lifestyle but comes with its own restraints.
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Sounds like living the dream 
Any pattern you’ve noticed while trying to spot some species in particular?
I am not quite sure what you mean. Feel free to write in French which I read quite well but don’t always write so well.
Not a diver, but like many others who are not, I’ve always fantasized about someday experiencing this.
Even so, I’ve really enjoyed the discussion here so far, and I was struck by how so much advice shared in this topic is absolutely true (in a dryer way!) for terrestrial observation.
Loved the distinction between photographing and observing. Universal!
Thanks divers for enriching the iNativerse!
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The auto corrector was too eager to help in my previous post. 
I was wondering if you’ve noticed any patterns in identifying good diving spots. Since other divers past experiences (like for named sites) aren’t an option for you, I’m curious about your methods. Do you mainly rely on mooring conditions or are there other factors you consider? I’m not a sailor so my question might be more vague than I realise.
When snorkelling, I prefer remote areas. It’s not just because I enjoy having the place to myself but I’ve also noticed nature tends to be more interesting and diverse there compared to famous tourist bays. I suspect the same applies to diving.
P.S: I’ll keep an eye out for the electric clam!