Deep-Sea Coral Collection Protocols - NOAA's Coral Reef ...

John Reed's August 22 article on Stetson's Reef from Islands in the Stream 2002 expedition has someterrific images, as does the entire 2003 Life on the Edge Expedition, courtesy of Art Howard fromNAPRO Communications. Notice that these examples have plain, appealing backgrounds and sharpfocus (Fig. 22). A tripod and good lighting will improve your depth of field, your camera stillness(unless your boat is rocking!) and your focus. Small flat plastic rulers are important for scale. Coinsare also useful (see Fig. 9). Simple labels, like a dive number or sample number, should be included.Place these labels so they can be easily cropped out of the image if necessary. You can study theseexamples of some high quality digital photography at NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration website:http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/1. Image Qualitya. Printed images or CDROMs of still images may accompany a sampleb. Print Quality Digital Files: 300 - 600 dpi .tiff, .png, or .jpg image filesc. Distribution Quality: 72 dpi .jpg image filesd. Low resolution still images may be collected ex post facto from video2. Camera Framing and zoom control (see insets on page 18)a. Community Image- the widest shot, includes organism, substrate and associated speciesb. Wide Shot- frame the entire colony as best you can. (Fig. 21)c. Medium Shot- branching morphology and associated speciesd. Close-Up Shot- epiphytese. Reference – Any reference for size and scale, e.g. ROV claw or laser scale3. Camera anglea. For transects to document habitat cover (%), you can have the camera angled at 90degrees to the bottom (plan view) or 30-40 degrees ahead for better estimates of colonyheight. Try to keep parallel lasers in view for scale. ALVIN uses two laser pointers set10cm apart.4. Data Burn Ina. include date and time, dive number, depth, and geoposition in metadatab. alternatively, enter this data into the image itself5. Practice Living Specimen PhotographyFig. 24. Alaska’s Aleutian Islands have diverseand colorful coral gardens deeper than 300 m.Commercial bottom trawl fisheries can damagethese gardens27