They come in several colour patterns. There is one found in the Red Sea that is dark metallic blue on its 'side panels', and dark olive green on it upper 'panel'. There are others which I've spotted, which ARE spotted
Here is something you can put on your Xmas wish-list...
Asia Pacific Reef Guide, 3rd REVISED EDITION 2007 [Hardcover]
http://www.amazon.com/Asia-Pacific-Reef ... s=debelius
It is not cheap, but is as close to comprehensive reef id reference guide as you'll ever need. If you do an Amazon search on 'Helmut Debelius', you will see he has published many other similar reference guides, on the various regions, and also specifically on corals, crustacea, and so on.
Underwater photography is not my thing, but I understand there are cameras that adjust the colour saturation [the 'white balance'?], relative the the depth of water, so the colours always 'look right'. The other consideration is that you can find buckets of macro stuff in say just 5m of water, so the colour there is pretty good anyway.
Yes 'Macro diving', is diving specifically to find the small stuff. It's often slow, very slow, not so deep, and very relaxed. The slower you go, the more you see. In fact I have a friend, a dive-guide, who does such dives, and carries a magnifying glass! Her thing is observing the polyps (tiny communal animals) that live in, and form, coral, and watching them feed. Other people I know have defined passions, nudibranchs (the very colourful sea-slugs), or shrimp. You need to go reeeally nice and slow to spot this stuff.
I think it's called macro diving, because to photograph it you need a macro lens. It is counter-intuitive in a way, as if anything, you'd have thought it might be called micro-diving.
Another variant is muck-diving, or critter-dving. This is tangentially the opposite of the 'white sands, azure seas, colourful reefs, big-stuff (sharks, rays, etc) diving'. It's macro diving, just with often very silty and dark bottoms at the dive locations. Places where you can do that tend to have the most bizarre creatures you would never have imagined existed on this planet. Every dive usually has one or a few 'What in Gods name is that.. that ... that THING!?' moments. Lembeh Straits off Borneo is the world class muck diving destination. I've only been once, but stayed here
http://www.diverslodgelembeh.com/ The Gallery tab on that site might help illustrate my point
There are maybe 5-6 other dive operations in the Strait... google on them if interested, I expect they'll have more pix too. 'Lembeh resort' and 'Two fish divers' were quite big operators, whose names I still recall ...
p.s. Feel free to ask questions, as you can see from the length of my reply it's something I enjoy discussing
