Photos taken at Rangiroa, French Polynesia, an atoll roughly 200 miles NE of Tahiti. I stayed at Hotel Kia Ora, and dove with Top Dive. All underwater photos were taken with a Canon 5D Mark II (21 megapixels) inside an Aquatica housing with dual Inon Z-240 strobes. You can also see a few short unedited HD video clips from the trip, including part of a drift dive, shot with this camera at http://vimeo.com/bruceyates/videos .
An atoll is the ring of coral/lava that remains where the rim of a vol ...
The Rangiroa atoll stretches for many miles, but only the section at t ...
This is a close-up of the populated section of Rangiroa, which goes be ...
Maps of the Avatoru and Tiputa, the two passes (gaps) in the Rangiroa ...
My bungalow at Hotel Kia Ora.
Another section of the Kia Ora resort.
The dock of Top Dive, which is next door to Kia Ora, and with whom I d ...
Although Rangiroa does not have the soft corals of Fiji and SE Asia, i ...
Rangiroa is known for drift diving, which is done during incoming tide ...
A winter wonderland? No, but the white sands around this tree-like co ...
A hard coral provides refuge for a school of colorful tiny (1 inch) fi ...
School of small barracuda (1ft long)
A school of small barracuda (1ft long) scatters to create an opening. ...
School of bannerfish (with school of jacks in background)
Longnose Butterflyfish
Red Snapper
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