On my trip to Bali in September 2022, I was chatting to my friend Lisa, and she told me that this was her first visit to Bali, and that she was very excited to go diving with Mantas in Nusa Penida.

I told Lisa, who is a relatively novice diver, that Penida was not for the faint of heart, and that she should probably go with someone with more experience who could look after her in case things went wrong... Well, it turns out that I was the one who ended up going to protect Lisa (very reluctantly, as you know).

The dive shop was able to provide a rental camera, but they only had a TG6, instead of a GoPro, which would had been my preference for video. The camera had a dark red filter on it, which can be good or horribly bad. In this case, it was the latter.

The diving was magnificent! Mantas galore. I would say we saw 10+ individuals, including a mammoth black Manta. The footage did not do justice to the diving.

In any case, I posted a video, because when you run into mantas you owe it to mankind to post a video on YouTube:

   • Mantas in Heaven  

A few months later, I came across a video by ‪@cameraconspiracies‬ that spoke about Topaz. I had always thought that grainy footage was basically irreparable, until I tested Topaz. This video is a re-issue of the original mantas video, after enhancing with Topaz to 4k, and reducing noise and grain.