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.