Blues

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.