Reef & Corals
Where the reef is the subject — the soft coral walls I grew up diving in Egypt’s Red Sea, pristine hard corals at Tubbataha that show what protection can achieve, gorgonian gardens in Sudan, and schooling fish in densities that remind you how reefs are supposed to look.
Reefs are where everything began
My first dives were in the Red Sea, and that still shapes how I see a reef. Soft corals opening in current, anthias lifting above a wall, a diver’s bubbles breaking the blue above a coral head: these are not background details. They are the structure of the whole underwater world.
This gallery moves between reefs that feel familiar and reefs that still surprise me. Brother Islands and Marsa Alam carry the color and vertical drama of Egypt. Sudan adds gorgonian gardens and the sense of diving somewhere less polished. Tubbataha in the Philippines shows what long-term protection can look like underwater: hard corals stretching into visibility, fish density that feels almost old-fashioned, and sharks moving through the edges of the scene.
What makes a reef photograph work?
I look for layers. Foreground coral or sponge, fish movement in the middle distance, and enough blue water to let the image breathe. Sometimes the subject is a school of jacks or barracuda. Sometimes it is simply the geometry of a wall, the way light lands on a fan coral, or the scale a small diver gives to the reef.
Many of these places also appear in My Big Five for Life, especially Tubbataha and the Red Sea thread that runs through my diving history. For individual animals within the reef, see Macro Critters; for structures the reef has claimed, visit Wrecks.