Bolinao Creative Output
I have had the great pleasure to spend three months at the Bolinao Marine Lab as a visiting professor of the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute, and I think I had some good success doing marine fish science…. But, there is so much beauty here underwater and on land that I also had a good time creating photographs and videos. Here is a best-of-Bolinao-2018:
Underwater Photography
The top attraction in Bolinao are the giant clams. The University of the Philippines breeds them, to restock wild populations.
I like the mini-dome for my GOPRO6, which is not just a good video camera, but it also takes nice photographs:
I still find this shot hilarious: it’s a crown of thorns seastar, the one which feeds on hard corals, with two anuses. What a very odd find.
And of course I was photographing gobies. This is Mahidolia mystacina, a pretty rare fish. Yellow and brown variants exist of this species, and this one is a hybrid, it seems. Gobies are very shy, and much harder to photograph than giant clams or seastars.
Video
I am stoked about this video, which documents the research we have been doing on the topic of gobies. I’m excited about the sequence with the eye-crest color change, and about the super slow motion of the escape into the burrow.
Here, I had the chance to film the induced spawning of giant clams.
I am really starting to like Instagram as a medium; with the quality cameras on cell phones these days, there are photographic opportunities everywhere, and with Instagram I can share them easily and right away.
Glaiza and I asked the dad of this young gentleman if he could pose for me in the giant clam shell; he was not so happy about the ideas at first, a bit shy, but his dad convinced him. Then he turned out to be a great model, with this deep look in his eyes. I had meant to get a shot like this for a while, to show how incredibly big these bivalve mollusks are, bigger than a small human!
