Category Archives: Photography » Underwater
Joris Kijkt: Maarten Loonen
This is the second installment of ‘Joris Kijkt‘ in Universiteitskrant Groningen, featuring biologist Maarten Loonen. Maarten studies barnacle geese and spends several months a year on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen for his field work. Since a quick round-trip to the Arctic didn’t quite, erhm… fit the budget, I photographed him while practicing another passion [...]
JEB Cover
This is the cover of the October issue of the Journal for Evolutionary Biology, featuring my photo of a smooth newt. It accompanies an article about crest evolution in newts. This goes to show how valuable a tool photography can be to you if you’re a scientist. Not merely as a means of collecting data, [...]
Underwater with Wild Newts
Search for an underwater photo of a newt, and you will find beautiful images of… newts in aquaria. So, last month I set out to fix this and went on a little expedition to the north of France to make a unique underwater photo series of newts in their natural environment.
Exhibit at Museum de Buitenplaats
I can hardly believe this — today it’s my honor to invite you to my first museum show. A selection of my underwater photography will be on display at the Museum of Figurative Art “de Buitenplaats”, as part of the exhibit that marks the museum’s 15 years of existence. Eelder Eden, 15 jaar paradijs op [...]
Scouting Pools for Newts
After an eight-hour drive I arrived in France this afternoon, where my friend Jeremy Upsal has joined me to get some cool photos of newts. The thing with newt photos is they always seem to be set up in an aquarium or on land, so my mission this weekend is to capture several species underwater [...]
Formentera
For the past four days, Nate and I have been working like crazy on our film about lizards of the Mediterranean islands. We’ve witnessed and filmed some truly spectacular lizard behavior. Today was our last day of filming and we now have many hours of footage to edit. Despite our busy filming schedule I did [...]
Lumpsucker
As I write this I’m waiting for my flight to Spain, where I’m visiting photographer, filmmaker and biologist Nate Dappen of Day’s Edge Productions. Nate and I will work on a short film about the lizards inhabiting Formentera, an island in the Mediterranean Sea. I met Nate at the Nature Photography Summit earlier this year [...]
Dive Another Day
It’s an underwater photographer’s worst nightmare: a red light on your underwater housing blinking frantically, screaming: LEAK! LEAK! LEAK! Yikes! I just had a leak for the first time during a dive to test a new drysuit. A scary amount of water got into the camera housing in the few seconds it was submerged, but [...]
Moon Jellies Galore
Here’s a quick photo from diving the Grevelingen yesterday. The moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) ephyras are budding off en masse right now. They are everywhere! To give you some sense of scale, the jellyfish in this photo are probably between one and five centimeters in diameter, so you can imagine just how many there are [...]
Workshop Underwater Photography at PiXperience
I’ll be teaching an underwater photography workshop at PiXperience on February 12 in Leiden, the Netherlands. Take a look at the brochure (PDF) or head over to the PiXperience website for more information. See you there! Update: PiXperience has sold out!
Review: American Waters by Alex Kirkbride
Whenever I visit an antiquarian photo bookstore I feel like a kid in a candy store. I can spend hours (no kidding!) flipping through the pages of the books, hoping to be surprised by some inspiring work of a photographer as yet unknown to me. This weekend I found another such little treasure: American Waters [...]
Pipefish: Battle of the Sexes Reversed
I will never tire of observing pipefish. The one in this underwater photo is a greater pipefish Syngnathus acus, blending into the Japweed Sargassum muticum. It seemed quite confident that I didn’t notice it—until it discovered its own reflection in my camera’s dome port, that is. Then the little fish came out of hiding and [...]
Compass Jellyfish
I’ve shown you a photo of a compass jellyfish Chrysaora hysoscella before, but that really didn’t do justice to this cnidarian. It’s beautiful. Be careful, though. Compass jellyfish are reported to have a nasty sting!
Who’s Our Closest Relative?
Yesterday I made this photo of a green shore crab Carcinus maenas between transparent sea squirts Ciona intestinalis in the Oosterschelde. Which do you think is more closely related to us? Although these adult sea squirts, or tunicates, don’t consist of much more than translucent sacks with intestines, their larval “tadpole” stage exhibits all characteristics [...]
Schooling Perch in ‘t Veenmeer
Probably my favourite time to dive ‘t Veenmeer is late summer. At this time large numbers of juvenile perch Perca fluviatilis form schools, and to swim along them in the evening sunlight, hearing only the sound of your own breathing, is the most peaceful and relaxing experience. ‘t Veenmeer (which translates to something like ‘The [...]
Bleaks and Water Lilies in the River Yonne
Welcome to the gloomy yet beautiful world of the juvenile Bleak Alburnus alburnus. Here, a forest of water lily stems makes its way up from the murky riverbed all the way to the surface, and the otherwise bright sunlight is reduced to a distant glow, as it seeps in through a roof of large, floating [...]
Pinched by a Lobster
Someone pinched my arm during one of the dives this weekend in Zeeland, so I looked over my shoulder to find this large, clawed creature: a European lobster Homarus gammarus. Photographically it was quite a challenging weekend. As you can see in the photo below of a Compass jellyfish Chrysaora hysoscella, the visibility was exceptionally [...]
Mating Common Cuttlefish
Not long after my previous attempt to witness common cuttlefish mating, I joined my friends Jelmer and Floor in Zeeland for a second chance, and what turned out to be one of the most beautiful dives I’ve ever made. I would say we saw around 30 cuttlefish — courting, fighting, mating, feeding, females depositing eggs, [...]
The Backyard
Every year when the water temperature reaches 12 degrees Celsius, several cephalopod species start to arrive in the shallow waters of the Oosterschelde (Eastern Scheldt), an estuary in the south of the Netherlands: the reproductive season has arrived. Especially the spawning of the Common cuttlefish Sepia officinalis is, by all accounts, a spectacular event to [...]
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