BRI Aquatic Cabinets News

Our friends at Gates Underwater Products have moved to a new location in Poway, CA, and are celebrating the occasion with an open house on Friday, August 22 from 3-8 PM. Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments will be served, but an RSVP is required - visit Gates for all the details, directions, and contact information for the event.

Wetpixel’s Eric Cheng and Matt Segal are currently out with Simon Rogerson (editor of Dive Magazine) in Seattle in an attempt to photograph six gill sharks (Hexanchus griseus).

We’re out here with Hydrus on the M/V Katherine Jane.  Stay tuned—I’ve managed to rig up a wireless network here and will be updating this page as frequently as possible with video and still image clips (click through to see video stream).

Our good friends over at Jim Abernethy’s Scuba Adventures are offering last-minute spots on a shark expedition this coming September. The Bahamas shark trip is well known here at Wetpixel, but has historically been expensive and hard to get on because of limited availability.

There is a significant discount on this trip, and I have never seen spots go at such a good deal. Trip dates are September 2-8, 2008, and price is USD $1989.00.

If you are interested, contact JASA immediately!

After 51 hours of travel, Wetpixel friend Tony Wu has spent the last week swimming with the humpback whales of Tonga, and has written in with an update:

Current status of the whales: The boys are horny; the girls are either hitched, taking care of kids or driving boys crazy; the kids are oblivious and enjoying themselves...They swam under us, around us, between us…playing all the while, doing twists and twirls while watching us. All we had to do was float and wait.

Continue reading for all the details, accompanied by photos of these large, and energetic, cetaceans…

A bunch of our users have upgraded to Adobe Lightroom 2.0, and many of them are regretting their decision. Users are reporting extreme slowness and inability to import metadata. Daniel Brown, an Adobe expert, added his voice of reason, stating, “There are some optimization tricks that seem to help, but my hunch is that people are using the retouching tools in LR 2.0 the same way they would in Photoshop and they are VERY different animals.”

This is a very good point. I tend to treat Photoshop as an application where my image is placed on a canvas, allowing me to use a tablet/pen to “paint” on a million tiny corrections. But when I’m in Aperture (an analogous non-destructive editing environment), I think of every mouse click as a precision operation because I know that all of the changes are being stored as “layers” over the original RAW file. It’s just going to be slower. Eventually, technology will catch up and we’ll be able to enhance/ruin photos without thinking about machine performance, but we are not quite there yet.

When I travel, I like to meet up with local Wetpixel members to dive with. It’s great because I get to connect faces with names. Plus, the locals always know the most about the local reefs.

In order to facilitate divers meeting divers, I’ve set up a new forum called Divers Seeking Divers. If you’re looking for a new local dive buddy, or are traveling somewhere and want some local expertise, head on over there and start posting!

Wetpixel publisher and editor Eric Cheng (that’s me) is speaking at the Northern California Underwater Photographic Society (NCUPS) this coming Friday, August 8, 2008. I will be presenting some of my favorite images and talking about how and where they were taken. In addition, I’ll show the RAW files behind the final images so you can see what goes into a typical image’s post-processing.

Location: New Vision United Methodist Church, 450 Chadbourne Avenue, Millbrae, CA.  94030. Doors open at 7pm for a pre-talk seminar. Eric’s talk starts at 8pm.

Today, Olympus and Panasonic announced a new mirrorless format based on Four Thirds. Sensors in the new system are the same size as they were in the original Four Thirds specification (18 x 13.5 mm), but Micro Four Thirds cameras will be considerably smaller due to the removal of the mirror. In addition, lenses for the new lens mount will also be smaller. The drawback is that without a mirror, optical viewfinders are not possible, and framing will have to done via Live View or electronic viewfinder. Micro Four Thirds is compatible with Four Thirds lenses through the use of an adapter.

This is particularly exciting for underwater shooters. A large sensor in a small package will allow us to maintain low noise in images while minimizing the size of a housed camera!

Alex Mustard leads a discussion about the underwater mode featured on some compact digital cameras.

On my last compact, a Fuji F40, it was a very useful feature down to 5-6m or more (say 15-20ft). But on my latest compact, a Fuji F50, it is useless - even at much shallower depths. Quite to my surprise.

...this leaves me confused as Underwater Mode is a software image processing feature, so you’d think it would be pretty consistent between two consecutive models from the same manufacturer.

Do you have any experiences with underwater mode on your compact digital camera?

Underwater video guru Drew Wong explores powerful options for portable hard drives and the increasing popularity of eSata connectors. In particular, I was interested to know that there is a 2-drive RAID enclosure that supports data over eSata while pulling power from Firewire.

While FW800 is adequate for backing up, it is limited to 66MB/s, whereas eSATA is at 134MB/s. The eSATA interface isn’t bus powered but the extra speed helps smooth out the workflow of backing up and clearing the flash cards for further shooting. The most important thing is these drives are fast enough to edit with multiple streams of HQ codecs like Pro Res 422HQ.

Of course, FireWire 3200 (S3200) is supposedly just around the corner and tops out at 400 MB/sec. Until eSata gets power, it seems to be rather unwieldy for mobile use.

The 9th Annual San Diego UnderSea Film Exhibition, scheduled for Friday and Saturday evenings, August 22 and 23, 2008 at the Qualcomm Hall in San Diego, has begun selling tickets to attend the event. Each evening will feature fifteen digital films of no more than five minutes length, from locations all over the world, to be judged by John Moore, Hans Bertsch, and Natasha Stenbock. Among the entrants are Wetpixel’s own Shawn Heinrichs and Paul and Kelly Wags!

View the full list of entries and purchase tickets online, or continue reading for the full press release…

Wetpixel member Sam Chae has taken his Nikon D700 underwater by putting it into his Nexus D200 housing. Sam posted sample shots (both wide-angle and macro) taken during his trip to Anilao in the Philippines.

Sam took his wide-angle shots with a 16mm lens, and the samples he posted look impressively sharp in the corners.

A few weeks ago, I went over to see a friend and his baby girl, Ella. Ella has decided that the first issue of Wetpixel Quarterly is her favorite book, and every day, she goes through the issue page by page and studies the full-page photos. I was amazed to find that at 20-months of age, she can name *every* animal in WPQ1!

Check out this video of Ella identifying critters (including a photo of me).

Join Wetpixel’s Shawn Heinrichs and the Liquid Assets team on a chartered adventure to Turks & Caicos this coming September. The Liquid Assets crew will be filming their new dive television pilots and are offering guests the opportunity to witness how their favorite dive programs are filmed and even be part of the next generation of dive television. Every diver that joins will receive free copy of the pilot. This week also offers a non-standard itinerary with visits to rarely explored walls and pinnacles. Wetpixel will be sponsoring a photo competition for guests aboard the Explorer II with winners receiving a cash prize and promotion through Wetpixel and LiquidAssets.

Wetpixel member Jeremy Payne posts a link to his technique for color correcting underwater images exposed with too little strobe light.

Here’s a method that can often return significant natural-looking color to your underwater images that have that blue/green cast. This technique works best with images without a lot of water column and lots of colorful stuff. I’m using Photoshop CS3 for this tutorial, but most of the effects are easy to replicate in other editors.

The results are in from the 2008 Layang Layang Underwater Photo Shootout in Sabah, Malaysia. The winners, whose photographs were judged by well-known underwater photographers Settimio Ciprianni, Stephen Wong, and Rod Klein, received prizes including trips to Palau, Truk, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, dive computers and watches, and Nikon and Sony dSLR’s and video cameras.

Continue for the full press release with the list of winners (including some familiar Wetpixel names!), or visit FiNS Blog for the winning photographs…

Alex Mustard has posted a placeholder in the forums for reports on the Wetpixel Sharks & Dolphins 2008 expedition, from which he has just returned.

OK, so the title turned out to be something of a misnomer - as Jim corrects me – it also included Palm Beach muck diving (Lembeh is now know as poor-man’s Blue Heron Bridge), Gulf Stream night pelagic drift, super macro plankton photography, nocturnal critter hunt on Sugar Wreck, “fishing” for birds as well as more sharks and dolphins than you could shake a stick at. Or in other words, just another amazing Wetpixel/JASA trip.

We can’t wait to see the photos!

Along with Wetpixel’s software upgrade, we have added a special feature to the Team Wetpixel subscription package. Although the upgrade made the forums area much faster (have you noticed?), Team Wetpixel members now get access to a new, low-bandwidth skin that makes browsing and participating in the forums *really* fast.

Team Wetpixel was started as a means for you to support Wetpixel, but we thought that you should get something useful in exchange for your hard-earned dollars. Continue reading to see a video of Team Wetpixel in action.

Hello, readers. Cor Bosman and I have been working for the past couple of days to upgrade the software behind Wetpixel.com to current versions. We are pleased to announce that the upgrade went smoothly!

Please let us know if you experience anything strange while you browse around here. We still need to make the POTW and Maps area fit into the new design, but the home page articles and forum areas are done.

Bilikiki Cruises has announced a final call for entries to their Solomon Islands-themed video competition hosted on YouTube - all footage submissions must be posted by the end of July. If you’ve visited the Solomon Islands on either the MV Bilikiki or MV Spirit of Solomons and filmed video of the trip, you could win a seven night trip on one of the boats, courtesy of Bilikiki Cruises, simply by posting your video to YouTube with “Bilikiki” in the title and visiting the competition submission page.

Entry is free, and there are currently only a few submissions, so this is a great opportunity to win a trip back to a beautiful dive destination. View the latest Bilikiki enius for more details - good luck!