Magic Planet

There is a shark in this picture. It takes most people a while.

A wobbegong is a carpet shark: flat, fringed, patterned like the reef, and content to lie on a coral table for hours waiting for something edible to swim past its mouth. This one is lying on one of the largest plates in Raja Ampat, surrounded by soft corals in colours that should not be legal, and it is almost invisible.

The whole scene is a fisheye: a lens that sees nearly everything in front of it and bends the world into a globe. To fit the plate, the corals and the shark into one frame the lens had to be within a hand's width of the shark itself, in heavy current, without a strobe arm or a fin straying into the picture. Two strobes light the corals from either side. The shark, camouflaged to the last freckle, lights itself.