Galapagos Photo Tour - Underwater photos and video!

I want to start this blog post by saying that I am no expert underwater photographer and have only taken photos under water a couple of times, but the following images also go to show that with decent photo knowledge and a small point and shoot camera, fun photos can be captured.

At first, I did not plan on bringing an underwater camera with me to Galapagos, but after talking to my contacts there, and seeing all the amazing sea life online, I thought that it would be a good decision. Canon no longer makes an underwater camera so I reached out to my friends at B&H photo who were nice enough to loan me a couple of the OM TG-7 point and shoot cameras to play with. I brought one for me to use and another to loan to my guests.

From the moment we jumped into the water with our snorkel gear, I was glad to have a camera in my hand. We saw a whole bunch of sea turtles and were able to swim with them for long periods of time. Knowing that the best photos would be captured close to the surface (where there was more light), I would typically wait until the turtles were closer to the surface before hitting the shutter button.

There were other times when I would dive down and capture photos a little deeper.

We could get within inches of these turtles. For this shot, I swam ahead of this turtle and let it come towards me.

We saw lots of different fish, and our guide (who was snorkeling with us) would help identify all of them.

We also saw some really beautiful starfish.

At one point, I swam up close to these rocks and saw some Blue-footed boobies that were hanging out. I raised the camera so that half of the lens was underwater and half was above the water line, to get this shot. I had to take at least ten photos to get the right amount of water and rocks in the shot. This one is one of my favorites from the trip.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we spent a lot of time with the Water iguanas. Most of that time was spent above water, but it was really cool to be under the water's surface and see them swimming around. 

They moved around really gracefully through the water.

I have snorkeled many times before (mostly in Hawaii) and have seen beautiful fish and sea turtles numerous times, but I have never been fortunate enough to swim with Sea lions. 

The Sea lions in Galapagos are really used to seeing people, so they will come right up to us and play, both with us and with each other.  That was really fun!

On our third time in the water, we came across a massive school of Surgeon fish. I dove down to get close enough to fill the frame with all of these beautiful fish.

Not long after capturing the image of the Surgeon fish, our guide pointed down and showed us four White tip sharks.

I followed this one around for a while capturing photos and video.

I was really enamored with the colors of the Parrotfish, and tried as best as I could to get a decent shot of one.

I had a great time capturing these images underwater, but had even more fun capturing video. Once again, I am no videographer or expert video editor, but I am still excited to share this fun video with you all. The video starts with underwater subjects, continues with some video on the islands, and then ends with some of my favorite still images captured on the trip. 

I captured all the underwater video with the OM TG-7 point and shoot camera, images and video on land with the Canon R5 Mark II, and edited the video using Apple's iMovie software. My good friend, Alan Waltz, saw the video and offered to score some music for it. You can check out that video HERE or by clicking on the image below.

I hope you enjoyed viewing all these photos and video from Galapagos as much as I did capturing it all.

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