 Welcome to Healthy Planet, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet on the ThinkTech Livestreaming Network series. I'm your host, Dr. Grace O'Neill. Joining me today is Kiyoki Sender, scuba enthusiast and marine life photographer. Today, we're going to talk about Hawaii and other places like Palau, I suppose, marine life. So let's get into it. Kiyoki, how did you get interested in scuba diving and photography? Well, when I was really young, my grandma would take me to the ocean and we would turn over rocks and find shells and my grandpa would catch octopus and my dad used to fish. So I always had an interest in the ocean and the things that lived in it and it just became my career path through college and so it was just always part of me. So how did you get started with scuba certification? So with scuba in my senior year at Kamehameha, they offered scuba for PE and I was not an athlete so I couldn't catch a ball, I couldn't run, I had asthma and so swimming and surfing were the only things that I was into and I said, hey, you know, scuba, that's an easy one to pass so I can go collect shells too so it was a no-brainer and it was free. Yeah, that's good. So that was my introduction to scuba and since then, I have had various jobs using a scuba or working in scuba shops. How about photography? How did you get into photography? So when I was a college student, I was a student employee for the Marine Option Program at Wimmer Community College and every summer we would have a coral reef ecological survey techniques workshop course and part of that course, a big part of it was learning how to identify fish, corals, seaweeds, invertebrates and we had to go through slideshows and write down the scientific names of every species and this was back in the late 1980s, early 1990s when it was all slide film so if you didn't have the slide, you didn't have a picture, you couldn't just go download something, there was no internet so it was either you had it or you didn't have it and so there were some gaps in the collection at the university so I thought it would be a great idea to learn how to use a camera underwater and fill those gaps with pictures so I proposed a student project which was too expensive and got turned down but that same year, when the semester started, I got some grant money from Kamehameha to pay my tuition and pay for books and things and so I spent it on cameras and film and I started doing it from scratch. So what did you start with, what kind of camera did you start with? Well to take photos of fishes you have to have an SLR camera interchangeable lens camera and so I looked into what brands and what models and I got a Pentax just because you could use old lenses, new lenses and it had autofocus so I got the Pentax camera and I bought an iCloud housing with some flashes and I just basically read some books at the library and learned how to set exposure and take pictures and that was just, you know, self-taught. Self-taught, that's great and then did you, I mean how about the housing, how did you figure out what to do with the housing, you just kind of looked up whatever went with the Pentax and... Right, so when I did the research I looked, I was working for a dive shop and so I looked at the catalog and what they were offering and so I just picked the brand of camera that was affordable and that had a matching housing and they were promoting the Pentax kit with the camera and the housing so it was like okay I'll get this one. And then I switched to Canon later on maybe about 15 years in. Yeah and then why are you saying that fish you can only, you can only take with an SLR camera versus a point-and-shoot for instance. Okay so with most compact cameras they have a wide-angle lens or a GoPro the wide-angle lens makes everything look smaller you have to be really close to it and of course if you know fish in Hawaii where they're being speared all the time or chased by tourists the fish run and the rule of photography underwater is to get as close as possible and that means three feet or less so if you imagine a parrot fish there's no way anybody can get within three feet of a parrot fish around here because they're gonna run so if you have a telephoto lens mounted on your camera it has a much narrower angle of view therefore on the frame the fish will fill the frame better it'll look bigger in the picture so an SLR camera allows you to do that. So you're using a zoom lens a lot on the camera or do you just use like a normal macro lens? So it depends I have about five different lenses I would choose from based upon where I'm at and what subjects I would expect to see or what do I want to what kind of images do I want to create so I could use a zoom lens and if I'm on travel and I don't know what I'm going to see or if they say well there's sea fans there's turtles there's sharks and there's nudibranchs sleet slugs so I would use a zoom lens because it can shoot some wide shoot some bigger things close up as well as some smaller things pretty close up but not super super close up it's a kind of a catch all and it's a you know it does everything but not especially great if I know what I want I'll either use a fisheye lens for a whale or I'll use a macro lens with a narrow angle of view for the tiny critters damselfish sea slugs snails those kind of things yeah and I mean the problem is is that you have to choose your lens before you go underwater because you can't change it underwater so that's the difficulty because sometimes you go and you only have the lens and then you're just you just have to make you just have to learn how to use what you got and sometimes I get in the water well I got no good pictures today because I have the wrong lens and that's just why you keep going back in the water every single time because you can go to the same place 10 times and see different things every time and if you start adding the equation of a lens then you even you know you have even more opportunities to to find and see new things do you feel like you know it's possible at all I don't know if you know any of the over-the-counter underwater point and shoot cameras do you know any of them or any of them you know possible like would you recommend any of the over-the-counter point and shoot kind of cameras for people who are just beginning and maybe they just want to get into and they don't want to put a whole lot of money into it yet with an SLR camera and then housing yeah so it is like you say in an SLR housing it's it's a 20 pound beast it's big it's heavy it creates a lot of drag so it's that's a whole it's a big commitment and of course the the money required for that on the other hand you know if you just want to be real simple like traveling and spend less than say five hundred dollars you can get an olympus tg series tg four five six we have one of those two and in a housing but they're waterproof so if you are really really minimal you can just go in with the camera and snorkel and do some shallow scuba with it and you can zoom the lens you can shoot some wide stuff with turtles and then zoom it in and get sea slugs and close-ups of little things on the reef or coral polyps so it's a very versatile system and you can add flashes or close-up lenses or wide-angle lenses you know if you want to upgrade so that is my recommendation olympus tg series and how much is that kind of camera like between three to five hundred dollars if you're buying new or used yeah i guess that's that's a good option for people because you know it is kind of daunting to go with the housing and i mean suppose you did want to buy suppose you did want to completely commit though and because you know with the slr it's great you can use it above ground two and get multiple lenses and then you know if you're already a photographer but you just want to get into the underwater photography what would you say was the most difficult thing for you to get used to with underwater photography um and if there's any mistakes that you made that you can help out other people so they don't make the same mistakes i guess so like i was saying that the trick to getting good underwater photos is to get close to your subject so minimizing the water between you and the subject is going to help to reduce the amount of cloudiness murkiness greenness of the image and also if you're snorkeling you you're in shallow water so there's sufficient sunlight but if you get deeper and deeper the water gets gets bluer and bluer because the sunlight is getting filtered out so as you get into the deeper realm you're going to have to either do a custom light balance or which is technical but or to add a flash to it um when it comes to using a flash if the water is not perfectly clear there's no sand stirred up and there's no bubbles floating around you're going to see a bunch of snowstorm in um in your images and so because of all the particulates so a flash takes some skill too yeah that seems like that would take a lot of skill do you ever bring you know how on land they have people have like the umbrellas and everything or like you know for portrait photography do people do that underwater uh not really so whatever you can carry well if you have if you're a you know the top pros and you have five assistants with five cameras and you can carry the whole you know everything all the boatload of stuff for you of course you're going to get some good pictures but you know the reality is most of us are diving you know with a buddy that's not going to want to carry anything so yeah it's pretty much your yourself contain so you have a a flash with an arm if you have the money for that or you just take the point and shoot and just shoot with the built-in flash um there's there's so many people on instagram that have fantastic sea slug pictures especially in the japanese and they just use the the the stock camera with the stock flash it's just they get great pictures learning how to use your equipment is the trick to getting proficient at it you have to learn what your camera is good at and not good at and focus upon doing uh what it is good at yeah and with the something like the olympus how deep does that go generally like these um i know they won't go you know that deep that's the thing so without the housing i think they can go to say 30 to 40 feet yeah but if you buy the either olympus housing or an ike light housing for it you can take it down to say 150 but as you of course you go deeper or you have the housing you may not have as much flash potential it may not it may affect affect the flash so you will probably want to add on a a flash is there anything you can do if it's murky um to kind of compensate for that or no are there any um so nothing really then well when the water is murky you got to be as close as possible again um but there are tricks you can use in the post processing when you get home on your computer to increase the black point to increase the contrast it'll turn the milkiness into dark shadows that can help but there's a limit to is how much you can get away with without it looking really strange so uh the honest truth is i i shoot everything on my cameras in raw mode and then convert them into usable jpegs with software and i do a lot of manipulation with the contrast the black point and the color balance to to make it look like how my eye perceived it and so it i think on nowadays with digital you have to have the techniques for diving for taking the pictures as well as editing in you know how to present them so how about filters i mean do you use any filters on your camera when you're underwater or you just kind of do you just change the white balance i know someone said you can like just play with the white balance if you have a digital camera you know what do you do to kind of make it not so glued out when you're down below you know when you see the pictures so some of the more expensive point and shoot cameras like the olympus may offer a white like custom white balance uh feature you can try the presets like the underwater mode or the cloudy mode of white balance you can try those things or leave it on automatic and after some experimentation you'll determine which one is best but if you want to be if you're shooting with without flashes just completely with sunlight you can do what's called a custom white balance which basically entails taking a photo of the palm of your hand or a patch of sand or the blue midwater area with no subject in it take that as a reference image and then you go into the camera's menu and say set this this image as my reference for the custom white balance and as long as you're diving with the same light conditions in the same depth range within about 10 feet your your images will come out pretty much how it would be if you had a an orange filter on i don't really use filters it's easy to do a custom white balance not with digital yeah what if you just have like a simple camera though like a gopro because i remember once like it was years ago but you had you got me filters from my gopro so underwater and it worked out very nicely so what would people who just have like a simple gopro you know and they have a house thing for it like what kind of filter would you recommend for that so i would recommend an orange filter for hawaiian conditions you would only use it beyond 20 feet and deeper because there's enough orange light in the sunlight in the shadows it'll be really orange if you leave the filter on in that in the shadows but with video yes filters are usually employed and there's another thing where you can go into the like a gopro and there's a native white balance feature if you use the pro tune options yeah and native mode allows you to go into your software and do the most corrections to the image and get the the colors quite accurate but it does still take some still to learn how to use the software yeah i mean i just got the max so i was um you know when i was snorkeling um i didn't use any filter but it was very shallow most of the time so it was fine you know uh but you know just for people because i mean if you want to record you gonna use something like a gopro right instead of your camera so it's kind of good to know um yeah so um why what i would recommend is uh using a scientific method to to figure out what works with whatever camera you've got and so when you first go in say just pick a like you know take a take a toy or something you know as a subject and try testing three feet two feet one foot away um and same thing for video just do some shots of this and and remember what your camera settings are try different white balances different filters and so you can learn and write those things down on us you know some or take some notes mental notes but don't try to do too much in one dive but you want to try to find that sweet spot where your camera is working the best for that particular situation and once you know that write it down remember it and then when you go back in the water you know and you can get all you need is subject to work with you then you got the good images um i want to shift gears a bit because i want to talk about your business and your website um so you also do scuba repair as well and tell us about that okay so i do scuba repairs regulators and bcds i serve most of the dive shops here on oahu and even like american samoa um quadrillion uh the outer islands so i've been quite busy with that i've worked on gears working in dive shops for like 30 years so i have a lot of experience and i've accumulated all the training so uh it was a a move that was good for me to to they employed in scuba make decent a decent living and still have the flexibility to go diving go surfing go traveling when i when i want to um but there aren't that many qualified technicians in the islands right now so it's uh it was a good time to get into the business about eight years i've been in doing it full time um and the website for the marine life photography is identification tool which is pretty much the a product of my uh days when i wanted to help other students learn to like how to identify marine life and so it's it's not a profit thing it's just to help to help yeah it's completely free it's wonderful i mean yeah i remember once i went to the like one of the aquariums near nimitz and they sell all sorts of tropical fish beautiful fish and they said that they used your website to identify all the fish i was like oh god i know him yeah so it's uh it uh one of the the faculty at uh helo um when i donated slides for them he says hey you know what i'll switch up with the server i'll give you some software show you how to make a web page and that's how it started and i haven't changed it much since then it's been running for running running since 1994 have you added more to it recently or it's been about every every um few weeks i get an email with a what's this slug you know from from just divers around around hawaii and beyond and i identified and i say hey can i share that on a new species page and i keep adding new species and usually it's from people who are contributing so it's a tool for everybody to to help educate others yeah and how about i mean it just because you've done so much diving and been here on the island and everything where do you think you know is is a good place for diving or snorkeling on oahu and also on the other islands where are some good sites where people can go snorkeling or diving um i would say that for oahu i really love sharks cove the north shore in the summertime when it's really you know flat and calm yeah there's a lot of fish it's it's got interesting topography so there's a lot of everything for people to see um hanama bay can have nice fishes but it's also usually rough it takes a lot of effort to swim out and back in so it can be good usually early in the morning in the winter time it can be good on the other islands i mean molokini on mawai is really good yeah unlike cathedrals is good uh if you can go to kawaii go to knee how that's really good yeah it was great the monk seals there i went i actually have some videos that i never uploaded i eventually want to do yeah and then if you go to kona um puako is a great snorkeling and diving area for shore diving and of course uh honao now city of refuge or two step that's also a really good place and for purely snorkeling and kahaluu right south of kailua town is also very good well really i haven't been there actually it's really good now go in the morning early before the parking lot gets filled like anywhere else and tons of fish and they're friendly they're good for pictures a lot of turtles yeah and then abroad um for for a lot of everything indonesia is still the best yeah west papua rajah ampot komodo those areas are amazing it's pricey but yeah that's if you want the best bang for your buck yeah indonesia so what kind of stuff do you see just more fishes or um more fish and more everything everything uh because uh the indonesia malaysia philippine's region is considered the hub of biodiversity in the ocean so you'll see you know a thousand kinds of fishes 500 kinds of corals whereas hawaii has 75 kinds of corals and 200 kinds of fishes it just as you radiate out away from that region the number of species goes down oh that's true i didn't know that and there's a lot of currents between all those islands and so more current brings more more food more plankton and so yeah the reefs are very rich the corals and soft corals and sea fans and manta rays and that's just so much and there's not a ton of dynamite fishing going on there in indonesia there's some areas that are bad but if you get away from those populated areas it's still quite quite nice yeah what would you say have you noticed anything over the years of diving and snorkeling and just being in the water here have you noticed changes in the coral and just like the fish everything have what have you noticed any changes i guess yes um in the let me be the the 40 years since i've been going in the ocean i did notice that fish population has gone down considerably there's just a lot of people there's a lot of people catching fish yeah um you know there's many different fishing you know current fish you know spearing netting yeah yeah so there's it's just less and less i quit spear fishing back 25 years ago because it was getting difficult with it with a pole spear um coral health has declined because the water is getting warmer um there's coral disease is coming in it's happening all around the world yeah every ocean has had the same problems so there's less let's say everything yeah sometimes it makes me want to cry when i see people spear fishing because they have these beautiful fish on the on the spear and you know and you're just thinking oh my gosh and you know they're just and because when you bring them to the surface they somehow don't look as beautiful as they do underwater yeah and also you know you think about these these a lot of brief fish can live five to 25 30 plus years you know they live a long time they live longer than in cats and dogs so you think about that you know they and there's a lot of predators in the ocean so they can't reproduce and and maintain their population if they have that long of a lifespan yeah how about the larger wildlife have you noticed anything different with like the sharks the turtles the dolphins or whales i don't know if you used to see i mean i've never seen a whale here actually in hawaii at least i mean from a distance but not close up ever but i don't know if you've ever you know what it was like 40 years ago um i think well i i don't really know about the whales that much but the turtles have definitely come back you couldn't see turtles you know as easily as you can now and they're coming on the beaches and nesting even when i'm a novel here they're nesting on the beach that's there's a lot more now because not being hunted uh but on the other hand the sharks have been depleted a lot from yeah you know those those nets and those uh those foreign vessels coming in and taking a lot of sharks so it's not it's not the way it used to be yeah that's really sad to think about that do you uh do you want to tell us about some of the photos you took there's some really interesting ones like the one with the whale how did you capture that so in tonga you can actually legally swim with whales if you're on a tour um they do allow snorkeling with the whales um there are some rules to to make it safe and not too irritating uh but it's also very rough there so when you go on the boat it can be like five hours of rough water and waiting and it's like you're fishing but you're not catching any fish because you're not dragging any lions and so it's you're out in the middle of nowhere waiting to find whales so um that was from tonga um i had a week of time in the water only got two swims with the whales and that's about the best image it's not it wasn't like it was very amazing you know yeah it wasn't what i expected yeah but even to be able to swim with the whales that's wonderful um yeah that's that's great um but anyway we're out of time so we'll have to wrap it up um i'm dr grace o'neill this is healthy planet on a think tech live streaming networks series um we've been talking to kiyuki sender the marine wildlife photographer and scuba enthusiast and um it's been really informative and i want to say thank you to eric our broadcast engineer and the rest of the crew at think tech for hosting our show and thanks to you our listeners for listening i'll see you on may 26 for more of healthy planet on think tech the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet our next show will be about how a whole foods plant-based diet can help with kidney disease with our special guest dr shiva and jochi nephrologist if you have ideas for the show please contact me at healthy planet think tech at gmail.com check out my website at grace in hawaii.com for more information on my projects including future show guests i'm dr grace o'neill aloha everyone thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at think tech hawaii.com mahalo