Giant Pacific Octopus

I took this shot last summer near Port Alexander, Alaska. Our previous dive that day had been in bad visibility so I was shooting with the macro lens. (My 2 workhorse lenses for underwater are the Tokina 10-17 fisheye zoom and the 105 AFS-VR Micro). I'd had a reasonably productive dive and my two buddies and I were finishing up near the top of the reef in about 20 feet of water and were within a minute or two of thumbing it (finishing the dive). Quite unexpectedly one of my buddies started signaling me rather excitedly. He'd found a very large Giant Pacific Octopus ( Enteroctopus dofleini).

This was a very nice surprise indeed as "GPO"s are one of my very favorite animals. Then can be almost friendly when they're out and about and are always fun to watch. Normally they tend to be found a bit deeper and at the base rather than at the top of a wall. The only problem was that I had the "wrong" lens. This animal's main body or mantle was at least the size of a basketball, probably bigger and its arms were easily over 3 feet long. A spent a bit of time cursing my bad luck before I got to work trying to take pictures of parts of the animal. Eventually I noticed the nice symmetry of one of it's arms and got this shot. I think it's much better than I would have done with the wide angle.

BTW teamwork can be very useful in underwater photography. In this case my buddies helped by both finding the subject and by holding the palm kelp back so that I had a clear shot at it.

Nikon D200, AFS-VR 105 Micro, Subal Housing, 2xSea and Sea YS 350 strobes.
ISO 100, f11, 1/250, half power on the strobes.