Lionfish hunting

The plan was simple, go out and film a lionfish hunting at night… in slow motion!!!

Whenever Flo and Dani turns up, we come up with these crazy ideas for special dives. This time Flo brought out a GoPro HERO3, which is capable of recording 240 pictures per second. that means 10x more than normal film speed. When you watch it at the normal speed, it will be extreme slow motion.

Coming from the tv and film industry, before becoming a PADI instructor, I really wanted to play with that. Sorry if this post is a bit geeky, but this is so cool…

We have seen lionfish hunting several times, but the attack is always so quick, that you don’t see what happens. So imagine that we can slow it down to a tenth of the speed… WEEEE!!!

So we mounted the GoPro 3 on a Goodman handle with 2 Light-For-Me video lights, and put an extra GoPro 2 on the side, as a backup. Flo took a Canon S100 mounted with a single Bonica video light, to get another angle. Dani was in charge of using her dive light to lure the lionfish toward us.

We used to have a lionfish in Dahab that would follow us around on night dives, and wait for us to point the light at a small fish. Then he would swoop in and catch it. We called him Edgar, because he would hoover up any fish he saw. Silly name, I know.

Edgar disappeared long time ago, but a new lionfish is contending to take his place.

Check out Flo’s version on youtube