CABBAGE CORAL - FIJI ISLANDS - NEMALI PASSAGE NEPTUNES ROSE This cabbage coral is 70 to 100 years old and is the largest and most pristine coral formation of its kind I have ever seen. The entire formation covers almost an acre and is teeming with fish life. The most beautiful emerald green from the surface it looks like a giant green rose. I never tire of returning to this site time and again never failing to produce yet another great image of this lovely coral. Located at the end of a channel we dive in for sharks. The current is very swift in the channel and you are swept along with the sharks unable to stay in a single location. As the channel opens up at the end and feeds into open ocean the current subsides and you are able to amble along at a more leisurely pace and the bottom terrain flattens out One hundred feet south in about thirty feet of water is where you will find this giant green rose. The magnitude of this coral formation is breath taking. I always take two cameras with me on this dive, one for the sharks and one for this coral. Image taken with custom underwater housing, Canon F1N with action finder and 15mm full frame fisheye lens. Exposure is a combination of available light and two small strobes to add color and detail to the foreground coral. It will seem to the average viewer that all is available light as the strobe intensity was carefully balanced to blend with the available light. This lovely creation of nature that took so long to create can be wiped from the earth in a heartbeat with one pass of a dredge net. One should never collect coral all the color is in the creature that lives within the hard skeleton of the coral. Once you break it the creature dies and the color is gone leaving only a white skeleton. It is my prayer this never becomes the fate of this beautiful coral monument to natures infinite ability to create wonders that marvel the eye, the mind and the imagination. geoff