I’ve been shooting underwater lately which makes me wonder if these posts need a new name. Travel Diary still works, I guess. But the pictures are certainly different now. Half of them are underwater. Half of them aren’t. So maybe it needs a new monicker? We’ll see.

In any case, I found myself back on the road again, this time headed to the quiet outpost of Dauin to keep working on my personal project, Below. Within diving circles this little stretch of coastline in the Philippines is pretty well known for the small, the strange, and the bizarre. If you’re not familiar with the term “muck diving” let me break it down for you. You drop down, hover over a patch of sand, and wait. At first it looks like nothing. Just dirt and rubble and the occasional shell. Not exactly the stuff of postcards or the nonsense we scroll through on whatever social media platform.

Then something moves. A frogfish. A shrimp. Something that looks like a leaf but isn’t.

The ocean has a sense of humor like that. Half the things down there look like cartoons or aliens or mistakes that somehow kept evolving.

Dauin topside consists of quiet beaches, palms reaching for the clouds, and long slow afternoons that seem to last for days if not weeks. After what was an extremely busy run up to Lunar New Year, it was a pretty ideal place to decompress for a bit. Some of those projects will make their way onto the blog soon enough, but for now let’s stick with the critters and some vignettes of a genuinely beautiful corner of the planet.

One thing I’m quickly learning about underwater photography is that it requires a fair bit of gear. So… that means I’m still trying to figure out the whole equation of what comes with me and what stays home. My original plan was to shoot on land and underwater with the Sony kit. In theory that works. In reality, different story.

Shooting underwater. Pulling the camera out of the housing. Swapping lenses. Shooting on land. Putting the camera back in the housing. Sealing everything back up again. Get back in the water. Repeat. Every. Single. Time.

After faffing about with that whole nightmare a couple of times, a new approach was necessary. The Sony stays in the underwater housing and the Fuji X100V takes care of everything happening above the surface. Whether that turns out to be a sensible long term solution or if I’ve just permanently complicated my life by jumping into underwater photography remains to be seen. If anyone has any advice on wrangling this circus clown of a situation, leave it in the comments below. I’d love to hear your insight.

So until I figure out what to call these types of posts, I’ll divide it into Above and Below. Bit on the nose, but here we are.