Raja
Soft coral crab · Misool · signed edition of 20
Raja means king, and this is the king of candy crabs.
The candy crab lives on soft coral and dresses in it. It plucks polyps from its host and plants them on its own shell, so that it disappears into the tree it lives in. Most are small, pink and hard to find. This one had grown a crown: a full head of coral polyps, orange and white, standing up like a headdress.
Misool, February 2026, on the reef that the resort's rangers have patrolled for nineteen years. Two strobes, one narrowed, so the polyps on the crab light the same as the polyps on the coral and the eye has to work out where one ends. He had never seen one so ornate. The title is the place, and the animal, and his own word for it.
The Station
Sweetlips table coral · Misool · signed edition of 20
A sweetlips holds still over a table coral with its mouth open, and small fish work through its gills and teeth. This is a cleaning station, and the fish come to it the way people come to a barber: they wait, they hold position, and they leave cleaner.
Around it is Misool: a pinnacle rising through the frame, soft corals hanging from the underside of the table, and behind, the fish life of a reef that has had nineteen years of patrols.
The current runs across all of it. Stay low and the topography shelters you; rise a metre too high and it takes you off the subject in seconds. Misool, Raja Ampat.
Blues
Whip coral goby · Apo Island · signed edition of 20
Two centimetres of fish, on a branch, in a sea that has been allowed to stay blue.
The rules of macro photography say: fast shutter, small aperture, black background. Let the strobes light the animal and let the water disappear. It makes a clean picture and most of the pictures on this site were made that way. But the ocean is not black. It is blue, or green in cold water, and if you slow the shutter right down and let the daylight in, the animal is suddenly where it lives.
That is what happened here. A whip coral goby, the size of a fingernail, lying along its coral in the surge off Apo Island, with the sea behind it doing what the sea does. Two strobes, back and wide, for the fish; a twentieth of a second for everything else.
