Bonaire last week (june 2012). Please critique?

[Interceptor121]

There are good and bad photographers, the pointer is a good tool the idea is not to kill as little coral as you can but actually to point it on a rock where there is no coral
Obviously then the tool goes in the hand of a poor diver it can become what you say
Last year I took a video in Egypt, one of the sequence had my buddy with one of those pointer taking pictures on a little wreck
You can see from the video that her fins don't touch anything and she is using the pointer very carefully, I can also tell you that there were plenty of areas of the wreck with no coral growth (you can actually see it yourself is the sharm video part 2 on flickr)
When we sent the link to the dive club we used for the dives the manager had a fit as he thought the pointer was suggesting to divers to touch things and decided not to put it on the facebook page unless I would have taken that part of the video out that I could not be bothered doing as I had gone through editing and sound track
This when even in courses such as PADI PPB we teach two fingers push up, definitely better to use a metal pointer
I would not generalise the use of certain tools as being destructive to the environment is not the tools is usually the diver who is the problem

I would like to compliment you on your angle choices. None of the pics looked like you were laying on the reef to get that upward angle (while devastating the reef ). I can't count the number of times I have seen photographers with very sophisticated gear wrecking the reef. They use their little metal pointer thingy so they only kill a few coral at a time, meanwhile they are oblivious to the sponges and coral their fins are destroying while they try to maintain equilibrium. Same thing applies to the "get closer" comments. Get closer but not at the expense of positioning yourself so as to do damage. You have a zoom feature to help "get closer" when crowded conditions do not allow it. The GREAT SHOT is not worth tearing up the reef environment. Just use care following all the get low and get close advice you will get. I have seen very experienced photographers completely oblivious to the damage they were doing. But hey, they got low and close and have pics to brag about.

For what concerns the shot they are good I would try in some cases a faster shutter speed as the backgrounds seem light but maybe that is intentional?