Mimmo Roscigno has posted some awe inspiring images on Wetpixel’s Facebook page in the past few days. Here is just one of his fantastic shots and the story behind how he got it:

The photo was taken in the Gulf of Naples, more precisely, outside the port of Sorrento where there are large buoys for mooring of vessels, they are anchored with big chains on a background of 50 meters. After having spent a lot of time exploring different chains I found this particularly one colonized by these worms and returned to the place many times because sometimes the water was not very clear, and when it was the oral appendages of these tube worms were open enough. Then one day after spending more than one hour at 25 meters, a gentle current with clean water and with the sun high in the sky, I could not get this. The situation only seems easy, in my humble opinion, to get a meaningful image one must look very carefully in the viewfinder of the SLR, trying to look at the flowers of worms one by one because they move with the current and tend to close easily due to bubbles that we breathe. The combination of the light flash and the environment was very important to me and I have been particularly attentive to the pair of time-set aperture because the depth was small and the sun very strong I preferred a fast tempo and a small aperture to isolate much of the subject in a black that would enhance the coloring of the subject and to avoid the sun breaking through the white.

Equipment: For this shot I used a Nikon D800 in a Seacam housing, Superdome with Sigma 15mm lens, 2 flash Sea & Sea ys-1, a Seacam 45 ° angle finder

Setting: F16 @ 1 \ 250 ISO 160