UKDIVING
Reef overhang at Levenwick Beach
Plankton and juvenile blue jelly subject, because most of the time they sit back on the kelp and don’ t move a lot.”
When Billy returned from his travels, he came into contact with local divers and snorkellers. He persuaded a friend, William Coghill, to ask for diving equipment for his 30th birthday and they started diving together. This brought them to the attention of a Shetland diving stalwart, Neil Finlayson, who in turn introduced them to Shetland’ s BSAC branch and showed them some of the key sites around the islands.
Neil can be seen as a silhouette on a reef scenic taken off Levenwick Beach close to where Neil used to live( he has since left Shetland).“ We’ d take Neil’ s little inflatable round to this site and it was just beautiful, with loads of big overhangs” Billy says.“ It was a perfect day for it, plenty of sun so that I could get that silhouette and use the camera flash to light up the soft corals on the overhang, a typical Shetland scene. It might have been late winter or early Spring, when you sometimes get unbelievable visibility up here.”
No sea in the temperate world has big visibility all the time, and Shetland’ s ecosystem relies on plankton blooms. This sudden abundance of micro-food kickstarts the food chain and even holds promise for creative photography.“ You get these aggregations of zooplankton that give off bioluminescence, but they are absolutely tiny,” Billy says.“ I shot the plankton with a juvenile blue jellyfish, maybe just a few centimetres long. With the spring bloom up here, the wind and tide bring in these dense, pinkish blooms.”
Pier performance
Thanks to deep water upwellings and a healthy food chain, Shetland’ s water column still has significant populations of fish. In summer, Billy often finds shoals of juvenile pollock around the pier legs at Lerwick Harbour.“ It can a big show and they don’ t seem too bothered, they swirl right around you,” he says.“ They’ re moving around quite frantically and it’ s a case of trying to capture that in a photo with motion blur [ using a slow shutter speed with rear curtain flash to freeze parts of the action ]. This technique is really hard, but I try it every now and then.”
Having established it’ s safe to dive, Billy sometimes visits Toft Pier, where ferries depart the mainland for Yell.“ It’ s tricky because the ferries run from it but if you get a bit of downtime it’ s absolutely amazing,” Billy says.“ Every time I dive there, I have an encounter with an octopus. Curled octopus seem to be fairly common up here, but some sites are better than others. I’ m fairly sure there are other sites in Shetland where I’ ve not seen them, but they have
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