Isla del Caño - September 2024

Lighting matters

I took lots of pictures but visibility wasn’t that good. I decided against using lighting - a bad idea due to diving depth (~ 18 m) and visibility. Pictures turned out blurry, grainy, and sometimes out of focus. I did take the torch I usually use but didn’t use it much. One of the things I like about it is that it has three different lighting intensities. I don’t want to always bang creatures with an unexpected flash of light.

Leveraging black-and-white

I’m not always sure when to use black-and-white filters. I’ve thought of it like a way to “save” a picture that doesn’t look good in color - like when everything looks greenish due to water color and lack of light. But sometimes a picture, no matter the colors, looks good in black-and-white. I felt this one looked good.

Which one looks best? I think the sand being white made me feel like a black-and-white filter isn’t that unnatural for this picture. There are not a lot of colorful details except on the fish, but overall I see like three colors: silver, yellow (according to this entry, the bars should be brownish) and black. There aren’t many colors that we lose if we apply a black-and*white filter so I didn’t see any risk on applying it. Of course, I know nothing about photography so I’m just sharing my thoughts here!

A chelonid shellebration

While diving, I’ve seen turtles before but this dive had the most amount of sea turtles I’ve seen! I think I saw two species: the green sea turtle Chelonia mydas and the critically endangered hawksbill turtle Eretmochelys imbricata. The pictures I took of the hawksbill turtle weren’t good and a thing that didn’t help was that other divers from the group were lifting sand with their fins. It’s important to get your buoyancy right!

Why is it called Caño Island?

I don’t know. Haven’t found anything reliable about its etymology. Anyways, here’s the end-of-post gallery! Even though I got many pictures, not all of them were good enough to be edited - lots of them were blurry.