#scuba #KoTao #DPMDiving
Grateful to @gonalvarezg for the guidance, patience, and amazing teaching throughout the dives. Learned a lot and enjoyed every moment underwater 🤿
‼️Win a color grading workshop for free‼️
‼️ Read below how to participate ‼️
🎥 This is what underwater footage looks like when the color grade actually does its job.
🦀 The Porcelain Crab is a Ivory white, crimson spotted, that barely 3 cm wide. Spends its life tucked inside the stinging tentacles of sea anemones across the Indo-Pacific.
It waves two delicate fan-like appendages through the current to filter plankton, patient and precise. A tiny, otherworldly creature that deserves to look exactly as surreal on screen as it does in real life.💙
🎥 That’s the challenge with underwater footage. The water strips warmth, crushes contrast, flattens everything. Getting those reds to pop against the white shell, pulling the anemone’s texture out of the shadows, making the water column feel like it has depth, none of that happens in camera.
It happens in DaVinci Resolve, one node at a time.
‼️ We want to show you exactly how we did it. 2 winners get a free workshop, underwater footage color grading in DaVinci Resolve, from flat log to final look. 👀
To enter:
✅ Share and comment this post.
✅ Tag 3 friends who shoots or edits underwater footage.
✅ Follow @uw.ocean.visuals & @dpmdiving
Winners announced soon. 🌊
#uwvideo #uwvideography #colorgradinglife #uwmacro #naturevideos
‼️ Some places don’t feel real ‼️
🌴The Gilis are one of them. 🌴
⛱️ No cars. No motorbikes. Just white sand, coconut palms, and water so clear you can see the reef from the surface. 🪸
🌴The Gili Islands are exactly what you imagine when you close your eyes and think “tropical paradise” except the reality is somehow better.
🤿 We’re out here running dives trips across Gili Trawangan and Gili Air, and honestly it never gets old. Underwater you’ve got turtles cruising the reef, reef sharks resting on the sand, and more fish than you can track. 🐢
Above water you’ve got hammocks, fresh coconuts, and a pace of life that makes everything else feel irrelevant.
🤿 If a dive trip has been sitting on your bucket list this is the sign. Come find us in the Gilis. 🌴
📍 Gili Trawangan & Gili Air, Indonesia
🤿 Diving | Snorkeling | Open Water Courses
🎥 @uw.ocean.visuals
👉 What are you waiting to join us ⁉️
#wonderfulindonesia #giliislands #paradise #scubadivinglife #scubadiving
Believe me if I tell you that this is something that you don’t see everyday ☺️
That’s not a juvenile that’s as big as it gets. 😅
👀 What you’re watching is probably the smallest seahorse in the ocean. ( Hippocampus pontohi ).
This tiny wonders don’t grow more that 1.5cm, and they’re one of only 7 recognised pygmy seahorse species in the world.
Spent 30 minutes searching in a meter square patch of algae and hydroids, knowing it was somewhere in there. That’s the thing with Pontohi, even with a precise location, your eyes just refuse to accept that what you’re looking for is actually an animal. 😅
🪸It mimics the texture and colour of the hydroid it grips so well that your brain keeps filing it as background. And when surge hits, the whole structure sways and the seahorse sways with it, so even movement doesn’t give it away.
🎥 Then when you finally lock on and try to film it it’s 1.5cm, it’s in constant micro-motion, and your subject is essentially a masterclass in not being seen.
Every instinct it has works against you, but finally I could get those decent shoots ☺️
‼️Worth every minute though.💙
🎥 Filmed by David Vazquez Farrus
➡️ Follow @uw.ocean.visuals
📍 Gili Air, Lombok, Indonesia 🇮🇩
#hippocampus #seahorse #tinycreatures #ssi_international #blueoceanprogram
👀You rarely see them out in the open.
🔦Tonight was different ‼️
🫣 One of the shyest fish on the reef, always buried deep in the coral, and when they do move it’s this constant erratic dancing motion that makes them look more like drifting debris than an actual fish..
ℹ️ Juvenile Harlequin sweetlips ( Plectorhinchus chaetodonoides ) mimic the movement of toxic flatworms to keep predators guessing, cryptic, twitchy, built to disappear. Most dives you find one and that’s all you get, a glimpse before it’s back in the coral structure refusing to come out.
☺️ But this night dive my video lights were pulling larvae and plankton into the water column and the whole dynamic shifted. The reef around it came alive and so did this little fish darting through the water column, picking off larvae one by one with a speed and accuracy that had nothing to do with the skittish little creature I’d found on a dives before.
🐛The moment the larvae flooded in, every bit of that shyness was gone.
Just clean, relentless hunting.
🎥 Filmed by David Vazquez Farrus
➡️ Follow @uw.ocean.visuals
📍 Gili Air, Lombok, Indonesia 🇮🇩
#sweetlips #reeffish #oceananimal #ssi_international #blueoceanprogram
🌴Gili Air is known for turtles. everyone says it before you even get in the water. 🐢
🎥 I’ve filmed turtles in a lot of places and most of them are on the move, cruising the reef, surfacing, coming back down, but the ones here are super chill. 😴
📍They pick a spot and they stay there, and once you understand why, it makes a lot more sense. green turtles can slow their heart rate down to one beat every nine minutes at rest, which massively cuts their oxygen demand and lets them stay submerged for hours without needing to come up. ⬆️
They’re not being lazy, they’re being efficient in a way that took millions of years to figure out.
ℹ️ But that same physiology is exactly what makes disturbance so dangerous. When a resting turtle gets startled by a diver getting too close, a snorkeler reaching out to touch it, fins kicking overhead its heart rate spikes, oxygen burns faster, and it’s forced to surface before it’s ready.
⚠️ Do that enough times in one dive and you’re not just stressing an animal, you’re disrupting a biological system that depends entirely on being left alone to work. A turtle that can’t rest properly is a turtle burning through reserves it can’t afford to lose.🥺
‼️So remember always to keep your distance and you fins still .
🐢 Let it do its thing.
🎥 Filmed by David Vazquez Farrus
➡️ Follow @uw.ocean.visuals
📍 Gili Air, Lombok, Indonesia 🇮🇩
🤿 With @dpmdiving
#greenturtle #seaturtles #uwvideo #ssi_international #blueoceanprogram
‼️ A giant frogfish swimming ⁉️
😱One of the rarest things you can catch on a reef.🪸
🤿Two dives into Gili Air and we were already losing our minds underwater.
ℹ️ Antennarius commerson is an ambush predator built entirely around the art of disappearing. Their skin mimics the texture, colour and even the irregular surface of sponges and encrusting corals with unsettling accuracy, not just visually, but structurally.
They don’t have scales. Instead their skin is covered in small spinules that replicate the exact feel of whatever they’re sitting on. They also carry a modified dorsal spine called an illicium, essentially a built in fishing rod with a fleshy lure at the tip that they wave to attract prey, then strike in under six milliseconds.
One of the fastest strikes in the animal kingdom.
🏊Swimming though ⁉️
That’s not what they were designed for. They move using jet propulsion, forcing water out through small gill openings behind their pectoral fins slow, laboured, clearly uncomfortable. 😅
When you see one midwater like this, it’s between ambush spots, is probably looking for its next piece of reef to vanish into.🫣
🎥 Filmed by David Vazquez Farrus
➡️ Follow @uw.ocean.visuals
📍 Gili Air, Lombok, Indonesia
🤿 With @dpmdiving
#frogfish #oceancreature #seaanimals #marinebiology #nature
⛰️ Limestone cliffs that shoot straight out of the ocean like they were placed there on purpose.
🌴Jungle so dense it spills over the edges of rock faces that shouldn’t be able to hold anything at all. Bays so sheltered the water sits completely flat, reflecting the sky back at you like a mirror.🌊
🐢 And then there’s what’s underneath…
💙Visibility that goes further than your eyes can make sense of. Coral that covers every surface in colour 🪸 A stillness down there that feels completely separate from the world above.
📍Koh Phi Phi is one of those places that makes you stop and just look. No agenda. No rush. Just the realisation that some corners of this planet are still genuinely wild and genuinely beautiful.💙
If you haven’t been, put it on the list, and come to say hi 👋 If you have, you already know.☺️
Tag someone who needs to experience this place. 🌊
🎥 by @uw.ocean.visuals
#kohphiphi #phiphiislands #travelinthailand #tropicalparadise #scubadivinglife
This fish just yawned. 🥱
Here’s why.
🎥 I’d filmed leopard flounders a dozen times before I had any idea they could yawn. Then a few days ago one opened its mouth wide right in front of my lens, and I realised I’d never actually seen that before.😱
ℹ️ Turns out it’s not yawning the way we think of it. Flounders yawn to flush water across their gills when oxygen levels drop, or to reset jaw tension after staying completely still for long periods, which makes sense, these fish are ambush predators.
They can sit motionless in the sand for hours, perfectly colour matched to whatever substrate they’re on, waiting. The yawn is basically a systems check.
💙 What gets me is how invisible they are until they move. The camouflage isn’t just pattern, they actively adjust their pigmentation to match grain size, colour, and texture. Then they partially bury themselves and disappear entirely.
Have you ever witnessed this behavior ⁉️
🎥 Filmed by David Vazquez Farrus
➡️ Follow @uw.ocean.visuals
📍 Nusa Penida, Bali, Indonesia 🇮🇩
#oceancreatures #flatfish #uwvideo #marineanimals #camouflage
👋 Say hello to Julia👋
🤿 Dive instructor at DPM diving Koh Phi Phi 🌴
👋 Hi, my name is Julia,I’m 21 years old and originally from Lleida, Spain. I’ve been in love with the ocean for as long as I can remember. I took my first breath underwater at just 10 years old, and from that moment I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to diving.🌊
☺️Over the years, this passion has taken me on an incredible journey, from working along the Costa Brava to now living my dream as a dive instructor in Phi Phi.
💙Every day I feel grateful to be surrounded by so much marine life, crystal-clear waters and the amazing energy of island life of Koh phi phi. Sharing the ocean with others isn’t just my job it’s what truly makes me happy, and I hope you to come to Phi Phi and show you the amazing underwater world 🪸
#diveinstructor #diverslife #ssi_international #oceanlover #divinglife
🦈 Meet the ocean’s silent guardians.🦈
🦈 Grey reef sharks ( Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos ) have patrolled these waters for millions of years and the ocean needs them to keep doing exactly that.
ℹ️ As apex predators, sharks regulate the populations of fish below them in the food chain. Without them, prey species explode in numbers, overgrazing seagrass beds and coral reefs until entire ecosystems collapse.
It’s a chain reaction that starts at the top.🔝
🌊 The ocean covers 71% of our planet and produces over half the oxygen we breathe. Sharks keep it healthy. That means they’re not just saving the reef they’re helping keep us alive too.🪸
➡️ Grey reef sharks are already listed as endangered. Overfishing, habitat loss, and the shark fin trade have pushed them to the edge.
Next time you see one gliding through the blue, remember that’s not a threat. That’s balance in motion. 🌊
💙 Share this if you believe our oceans are worth protecting.
🎥 Filmed by David Vazquez Farrus
➡️ Follow @uw.ocean.visuals
📍 Palau, Micronesia 🇫🇲
#sharks #sharkdiving #wearessi #ssi_international #blueoceanprogram
