STUART PHILPOTT'S COLUMN: Diving a tuna pen

No matter where I am in the world I’m always on the lookout for new story leads. During a recent trip to Malta the sales manager at Maltaqua, Simone Brinch-Iverson, showed me some wide angle jpegs of Bluefin Tuna taken from inside the holding pens off Qwara point. I was really impressed with the photographer’s shots (I guess the fact that they were all trapped inside a 50m diameter holding pen had helped). The best composition showed a number of the 100-200kg fish in the foreground with hundreds more silhouetted against a blue water background. The only slight drawback was that there was no perspective of scale. Some individuals were as big as a car but this hadn’t come across very well in the pictures.

Simone said for a small fee divers could go inside the pens and take photographs or just swim around with the fish. At first I was keen to take the plunge and get some pictures of my own. I had begun formulating my own ideas and thought there might even be a front cover in the midst, but then I started thinking about the morality issues. The situation was very similar to taking pictures of animals at the zoo or fish inside an aquarium. It just didn’t sit right.

What started off as a simple picture opportunity ended up being an ecological hornet’s nest. I knew nothing about the tuna ‘farms’ so began to investigate further. Mediterranean Bluefin Tuna are on the IUCN red list as an endangered species and current stocks are falling at such an alarming rate they may well become extinct during my lifetime. I thought the Bluefin’s plight made a worthy storyline so went ahead and organised a trip out to the pens.

Swimming in circles, the tuna create a vortex effect

Tuna fish are seriously big business, especially on the Japanese market. Newspaper headlines recently reported a 350kg A-Grade Tuna going at auction for more than £250,000 Sterling. That’s around £743 per kilo!

The tuna come up to the surface to breed, making them an easy target for fishermen. The captured fish are left in so called ‘farms’ for several months to fatten them up ready for slaughter. Under the right conditions they can put on an extra 35kg in three months.

In my mind the best way to show some size perspective was to put a diver in the picture. James Norris had recently finished his PADI Instructor IE exam and was keen to help me out. It was late afternoon and the tuna were moving pretty fast (bursts of up to 55mph) so I set the shutter speed to 1/200th to keep the image sharp and used ISO 320 with an aperture of F6.3. I should really have chosen F7.1 or F8 but managed to salvage the pictures in photo editing software. James was racing around like a lunatic trying not to get sucked down by the vortex effect caused by the circling fish. His heavy breathing made it extremely difficult for me to get a ‘clean’ bubble-free picture. I took portrait and landscape shots using a 10-17mm Tokina fish eye lens with the sun behind and in front of me. The twin Sea and Sea YS110 flashguns were mostly set at three quarter to full power. The fast moving tuna would come within two or three metres of James and then swerve away.

Shot used for Sport Diver April 2010 cover

I spent 45 minutes with the majestic tuna and ended up going back for a second visit. I don’t think I quite managed to pull off my ideal composition. I think the shots of James are quite effective but the fish in the background still look too small. The story itself (published in Sport Diver April 2010 Edition) generated both positive and negative feedback.

If you have any questions about Malta, the tuna pens or underwater photography please get in touch on adventurediving@yahoo.co.uk.

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