Marlin and Diver

2025 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Competition │ 2nd Place — Wide Angle Category

The story behind Marlin and Diver

2025 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Competition — 2nd Place Wide Angle

This Is Not a Traditional Wide-Angle Photograph

Photographing bait balls in Magdalena Bay felt both familiar and fundamentally different from any wide-angle work I'd done before.

The similarities lie in the unforgiving technical demands: fast-moving subjects, unpredictable distances, no flash—only natural light. Balancing shutter speed, aperture, and ISO within split seconds is always a high-stakes gamble.

The difference? This gamble isn't about luck. It's about cashing in on technique and experience.

Why Distance Becomes Forbidden in Front of a Bait Ball

There's a universal rule in underwater photography: the closer, the better. More distance means more water between you and your subject, which inevitably degrades image quality.

But when photographing bait ball predation, this principle often breaks down—because getting too close can make the entire scene vanish.

It's not about fearing a striped marlin's bill. The real risk lies elsewhere: marlins and sea lions seem to share an unspoken social agreement. When another large creature clearly intrudes and signals intent toward the bait ball, the predators sometimes yield—surrendering the entire school.

For divers, getting too close can turn you into "the one being deferred to." The result? The marlins and sea lions disappear, and the entire predation scene collapses in an instant.

But Distance Isn't Entirely Up to the Photographer

To complicate matters further, a bait ball is a mass of small fish fighting for survival. Driven by self-preservation, they often actively approach divers—sometimes engulfing you entirely.

In that moment, even if you rationally trust that marlins won't deliberately ram into humans, the pressure is immense: fish swirling at high speed from every direction, predators potentially slicing through at any second. The uncertainty is overwhelming.

This means: there's no fixed formula for photographing marlin hunting bait balls. Distance, rhythm, and risk boundaries can shift completely from day to day. The exception becomes the norm.

A Neuroscientist's Perspective on Marlin Vision

As a photographer with a background in neuroscience, I'm acutely aware of one advantage striped marlins possess that humans simply cannot match: they can actively heat their eyes and brain, dramatically increasing their Critical Flicker Fusion frequency (CFF).

When the sardine ball appears to me as nothing but a chaotic, high-speed blur, the marlin's visual system likely processes it closer to slow motion. They're not charging blindly—they're executing precision kills at a temporal resolution I cannot access.

This made me realize: what I needed to anticipate wasn't just position, but the behavior of a creature that processes reality faster than I ever could.

My Solution: Maintaining Continuous Judgment Amid Uncertainty

Rather than waiting for a single decisive moment, I shifted my shooting approach to something closer to filming.

I used the largest external monitor I could manage, maintaining intense focus on the screen while swinging the camera and continuously recomposing. Simultaneously, I kept predicting the likely trajectories of the marlins and sea lions.

This wasn't pure blind shooting. It was a real-time synthesis of judgment, prediction, and calculated risk.

This working method drew from two distinct areas of my background: the real-time improvisation skills I developed as a musician performing with bands, and the dynamic imaging training I accumulated over recent years documenting mitten crab migrations for the New Taipei City Water Resources Department—hours upon hours of tracking fast-moving individuals.

When Experience Finally Pays Off

In Magdalena Bay, those years of accumulated experience found their moment.

As the bait ball surged through open water at high speed, I wasn't waiting for luck. I was constantly judging, adjusting, and composing—allowing that decisive instant to emerge naturally from the process.

For me, this image isn't a lucky accident. It's the result of a shooting methodology and a way of seeing.

More importantly, I genuinely enjoyed every moment of it. Those few hours may have been among the most relaxed and pressure-free shooting experiences of my life. Under such highly unpredictable, intensely demanding conditions, to capture both the marlin's predatory strike and my wife within the same frame—that felt like an extra stroke of fortune.