A April 2018 FATA MORGANA dventure Lembeh - Beyond Macro Wide Angle Tips for the Macro Shooter How to get everyone excited for North Sulawesi
Lembeh - Beyond Macro What if I told you of an exotic destination with big visibility, fairytale reefs, mysterious caves and amazing historic wrecks teeming with marine life? What if I told you of a place where the warm inviting waters attract even the biggest of marine life like whale sharks? A home away from home where the people are beyond friendly and the natural beauty makes your heart ache after you leave. What if I told this paradise both above and below the waves is Lembeh, world famous for muck diving and macro photography? Lembeh is legendary as a destination for the hard core macro photographer, but it is so much more. Located at the very tip of North Sulawesi in Indonesia near the city of Manado, it is blessed by geography and ocean currents. Tidal currents that sweep through the channels and deep rich waters just offshore churn with nutrients that make this an environment ideal to find all varieties of marine life. Known for the bizarre critters that can be found lurking in the black volcanic sands, Lembeh has so much more to offer. So put away your preconceptions and look up from your magnifying glass and see Lembeh beyond macro!
There are very few things in life better then pulling away from the dock and feeling the sea gently rock you as you head north with the morning sun over your shoulder and rugged volcanos and jungle to either side. The narrow channel soon opens up a little as you approach the northern end of the Lembeh Straits and the gentle waves give way to ocean swells. Dropping anchor not far from the palm tree lined beaches, the water quickly transitions from the calm turquoise of the magical coral reef shallows to a deep sapphire blue. This knife edge transition from calm sun drenched shallows to mysterious deep blues can only mean one thing: an amazing wall. Rolling into the warm waters reveals that this not just a sheer vertical cliff, but a corner where two walls and two currents meet. The walls are absolutely smothered in vibrant soft corals with majestic sea fans waving in the current over them. Descending amidst the schools of angelfish, damselfish and anthias the current does all the work making the marine world pass by like watching an amazing 3D movie. The free fall from the surface ends at 28m with a large dark hole in the wall, like a giant maw daring the diver to enter.
This is no simple cave, this is the Angel s Window. Entering the cave there is plenty of room for two divers to swim side by side amidst the massive seafans and whip corals towards the deep blue light deeper in the cave. After a short swim in the dark the diver is rewarded with a huge room full of almost every kind of reef fish bathed in sunlight shining down from the surface clearly visible almost 30m above. Turning around to look back into the cave is when you realize there is something special about this cave, it is actually several caves that all lead from the wall into this magical sun filled chamber. A smaller and shallower cave is your exit when your time here is finished. This gently winding passage is almost completely filled with corals, crinoids and sponges on all sides; and slowly moving through is it feels like being inside the living heart of a vibrant coral reef. Keep an eye out for downdrafts as you ascend back up the wall to your boat and smiling crew waiting above to haul you and your gear out of the water.
Maybe your sense of adventure includes a lust for rust and the mystery and drama of historic shipwrecks; well in this case head towards the southern end of the Lembeh Strait and the bustling commercial port of Bitung. The boat ride down to the port is simply amazing as you pass steep cliffs that drop straight into the blue waters and even a natural arch that you can swim under. The port itself is surprisingly busy with a variety of barges, tugs and smaller cargo ships coming and going. Normally the idea of diving in the vicinity of a commercial port is not a pleasant thought. Well prepare to be surprised, this is not the case here! Hitting the water and heading down the mooring line currents pull on you as the wreck quickly comes into focus. This wreck is called the Malawi wreck, but the real name is a mystery. What is known is that this was a Japanese vessel sunk in 1943 by US bombers. She is around 100m long and has a single propeller, which is still intact, and for years the wreck was off limits as it was carrying a cargo of anti-ship mines! The mines have since been removed by the Indonesian Navy and the wreck is safe to dive.
The Malawi wreck is lying on its port side in about 30m of water and is mostly intact. Descending the line you have plenty of company with big schools of mackerel and jacks swarming the wreck, with an occasional tuna darting through the water. The line ends on the superstructure, which is totally encrusted with a huge variety of marine life including some incredibly colorful and huge nudibranchs! Heading down past the smoke stack you quickly come to a black opening about the size of a van. This is the skylight for the engine room, and it is where the penetration begins. Inside the engine room things are dark and machinery is still everywhere, creating an awesome sense of drama and history. You can still almost see the crew at work as things are just the same as they were 73 years ago when this area was still in the air and full of noise. The only sound now is your bubbles as you slowly kick deeper into the engineering spaces and finally swim through an opening ripped in the steel by an explosion long ago. This takes you into the large dark rear cargo hold and finally back into the light near the stern.
The area around the stern is littered with debris, massive gorgonians, wavy whip corals and is swarming with sweetlips and other big fish. Swimming around this amazing scene you come across the rudder and propeller, which are both still in place. It can take a moment to figure out what you are looking at, as the marine life growing on them is both very dense and very colorful. From here it s an easy swim back up hull, which is a great place to look for critters with your remaining air and bottom time. Angels Window and Malawi Wreck are just an example of the dives that are available in Lembeh when you go beyond macro. There are other wrecks and other hidden caves. There are many more walls and currents are always around to provide an incredible high adrenaline drift dive. Even the macro and muck diving sites more often than not have amazing reefs full of corals and endless varieties of reef fish if you leave the sandy areas and head towards the shallows near the shore. Don t be fooled though there is always plenty of macro if you want a change of pace! The caves, wrecks and walls are crawling with the weird and bizarre. There are few places in the world you can do a cave dive with pygmy seahorses, wreck dives with giant solar powered nudibranchs and all the while being swarmed by an amazing variety of fish. This is a normal day in Lembeh, but only if you go beyond macro.
Wide Angle! Tips For Macro Shooters
Many underwater photographers begin by shooting macro critters, as these small animals make excellent subjects and it is possible to use a couple of different camera settings and just about always get a good picture. So to enhance their macro shooting they buy macro lenses, ports and strobes. Along with the gear, they will obviously go to destinations that feature great macro subjects. Well in the first article we disproved the notion that Lembeh is only for macro, indeed this is a wide-angle paradise! So why don t more people shoot wide-angle, especially in Lembeh? Simply put: wide-angle can be intimidating and there is no single combinations of camera settings that can guarantee a good picture every time. So what is a macro photographer to do? Well the good news is that you probably don t have to go buy any new gear! Seriously, you likely already have everything you need to take cool wide-angle shots. Most cameras come with a 14-42 or a 12-24mm lens in the box as standard and these will work just fine to start. Now you re thinking that you need to get one of those huge, ungodly expensive dome ports you see all the time. Nope. That lens you have will probably fit in one of your macro ports. In these images I used an Olympus EPL3 mirrorless camera (yes that little thing!) with a 9-18mm lens that came with another camera. This lens works in my macro port with only minor vignetting at 9mm, otherwise I m good. For full sized SLR users, that means I was shooting an 18-36mm equivalent; which is very close to the standard lens size that comes with most cameras. Score!
So rig up your camera just like you would for a macro shoot, except make sure you put the other lens on there, and hit the water. Now first off you will need a subject and a background. Subjects are easy, just find something cool or colorful and make that your foreground. Just like with macro you will need to get closer than you think, you will need your strobes to light up the subject so make sure you are not too far away. Now the big difference with wide-angle is the background. In macro the background is often black, or minimalized; in wide-angle the background is a hugely important part of the image. Easy backgrounds to use are blue water, surface waves and the sun. You can always get a pretty good image with those three. Once you have your image composed with the subject and background you will need to set your exposure. The key to these pictures are to set your exposure to your background, which will very often be much brighter than your subject. Now turn your strobes off TTL and on to manual. Take a test shot and then adjust your strobe power to light up the subject, while keeping the background correctly exposed. Boom! Awesome shot! Also keep in mind that with wide-angle you will be moving your strobes around a lot. This is not like macro, where many people will set their strobes in one position and leave them for much of the dive. Keep those arms loose and flexible and move those strobes around. Also try and use a diffuser to prevent hard line shadows where your strobe light falls off. Hopefully this will motivate you to go out and shoot some wide-angle and to look at Lembeh in a whole new light.
North Sulawesi: How to Get Everyone Excited! Lembeh is the popular name for the area around the Lembeh Straits of North Sulawesi, Indonesia. This area is the far northeastern tip of the incredibly bizarre shaped island of Sulawesi and the principle city, and airport, in the area is Manado. Any trip to Lembeh will begin in Manado and then a two hour drive over the mountain to Bitung and then to wherever your resort happens to be. The Lembeh area is super famous for macro critters and muck diving, not exactly the kind of thing to get your less enthusiastic spouse or kids excited about. Have no fear though, this area can make an epic family adventure and you don t have to sacrifice finding your very obscure nudibranch to make it happen! Even if you have a family of divers, getting them excited about silty muck is going to be a challenge. Well thankfully Lembeh is blessed with some amazing reefs with great viz and stunning colors, so to make your diving family happy just ask to do a mix of sites. The guides will be privately thrilled to do something different and you can be assured of having the place to yourself. Not many people come here for the reef and wall dives, which is a shame, so use that to your advantage.
Now if your family are not divers the best way to get them excited about North Sulawesi is to make them into divers! This is a fantastic area to learn to dive, and discover scuba dives here will be lifelong memories for kids. Just get ready with your credit card though, as after a discover dive you will likely be paying for an Open Water class in the near future. Another way to do this is to break your trip to the area in two parts. Go dive Lembeh first, but leave a few days on the end of your trip for the area around Manado and Bunaken. The area just offshore of Manado has some of the greatest wall dives on earth with tons of colorful fish, big visibility and all in an absolutely smashing setting. What Lembeh is to macro diving, Bunaken is to wideangle diving. This area will satisfy even the pickiest diver who only likes pretty reefs, except they may be mad you did not spend your entire trip here. For those days when you cannot, or don t feel like diving, this area is also full of adventure. It s easy to get kids excited about an adventure into the jungle covered volcanoes to find monkeys, especially the incredibly cute tamarinds. Trekking jungle paths looking for the small monkeys and hearing the clamor of the black macaques really gets that explorer feeling going in kids of any age. Or perhaps you want to go find isolated waterfalls and mountain tribes that are isolated from the modern world, there is plenty of that too. Around Bunaken there are plenty of stunning beaches to lounge around the day if you so choose. Usually though the monkeys are the biggest hit and they totally blow away seeing them in the zoo. So even for your non-divers there is plenty to do around Manado.