Light.

A phosphorescent dinoflagellate, you say?

Yes. A kind of microorganism that glows in the dark.  And it lives in salt water, but especially in Jamaica’s Luminous Lagoon. And it glows when agitated – like when there’s swimmers:

I was the only person to get any pictures. Why? Because it was dark. Very dark. Very, very dark.

So I had to shoot like this:

  • 16,000 ISO (!)
  • f/2.8 – f/4
  • 1/2 second shutter time, on a boat.
  • Manual focus – guessed because it was too dark to see even to focus manually.

Even then, I had to push the shot a little in post.

Longer shutter speeds and a tripod, you say? Not on a moving boat!

I could not see my focus scale, so I could not even look at the lens and manually set the sharpest point to, say, 3m. It was all guesswork – and guess what, it worked. Good gear (f/2.8, 16,000 ISO, yes, sixteen thousand) helped me a lot.

 

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