|
Realm of the Pygmy Seahorse, by Constantinos Petrinos
Realm of the Pygmy Seahorse, by Constantinos Petrinos
Attempting to show a pygmy seahorse to a diver uninitiated in the visionary skills of the macro photographer is futile. It is too small and too well camouflaged. Show any non-diver a photograph, lit in a full spectrum of colour and greatly enlarged from the size of less than a quarter of your pinkie fingernail, and they will marvel at this colourful wonder of nature.
Constantinos Petrinos' book Realm of the Pygmy Seahorse provides a bridge between the actuality of the weird and wonderful animals that dwell in the only recently discovered, diminutive world of muck-diving, and those of us who are prepared to marvel at the diverse life on our planet, but who have neither the access nor the quality of eyesight to enjoy it first-hand.
The Lembeh Strait in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, provides the source material for this compendium of pictures of animals that are, in appearance, beyond the most fanciful imagination.
Frogfish, devilfish, scorpion leaf-fish, hairy frogfish, ghost pipefish, cockatoo waspfish - they are all there. Then there are the nudibranchs in all their multiplicity of variety and colours, shrimps, crabs and clingfish.
Even a couple of larger and more mundane (!) subjects such as a Spanish dancer manage to squeeze into this luxuriously produced tome and, of course, the star of the underwater show, the mimic octopus, gets good coverage.
It's a coffee-table volume that almost represents a catalogue of muck-diving species, vividly brought to life by the macro photographer's art.
John Bantin
|
| Realm of the Pygmy Seahorse, by Constantinos Petrinos (AquaPress 01702 462466). Hardback, 256pp, £39 |
|
|
Archive | 
