Happy Christmas!

Great viz!

Hitler gets turned away from the Diveboat

This made me laugh!

Red Sea Pictures

I've managed to scale back my images from the trip to a more manageable number, and done the preliminary editing on them. I've put a gallery up here

Please bear in mind that there are still too many, and the quality on some of them is not as high as I would wish, but I felt I should get something out rather than nothing! The gallery will be changing and shrinking(!) with time. Any comments/feedback or likes and dislikes would be very welcome.

Amazing footage of a Leopard Seal

Check out this short video interview of Paul Nicklen, who describes a four-day encounter with a large leopard seal in Antarctica. A leopard seal befriends Paul and presents penguins to him, presumably trying to feed what it thinks is a truly incompetent predator. The story is an incredible one—truly the once-in-a-lifetime encounter that every serious wildlife photographer hopes to have one day.

Red Sea holiday

I've just returned from a week long trip to Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. We spent a week diving and chilling out in the sun!

I took over 900 photos, so as I get them organised, I'll start putting them up on here. Many thanks to Pete Leathley, our "photo-friendly" dive guide!

Sturgeon

Capernwray has 4 of these pre historic looking fish!



I think sometimes sci-fi is based on reality!

Weedy sea dragons on BBC life

Hi all,

There is a preview of the next episode of this excellent series here

It is featuring the courtship ritual of the weedy sea dragon-and shows how fanastic this series has been. BBC natural History unit at the top of their game again.

For those of us in the UK, the next episode goes to air on Monday 2nd Nov at 2100.

Eric Cheng's Pigs in the Bahamas

Eric, owner and founder of Wetpixel, has just put these pictures up on his Flickr page


Great, different underwater photography!

Lightroom 3 beta released

Adobe released the latest beta version of Lightroom last week.

It is available for free download at Adobe labs here

My initial impressions are that the major changes over 2.5 are "under the hood". In terms of usability, there is a much improved import interface, the ability to export to Flickr etc direct from the library, and much beefed up noise reduvtion (for all thes new high ISO camers!)

I notice that Jeff Friedl is re-writing his excellent export plug ins-this should improve 3's functionality.

I know lots of people use LR on here, it would be great if we could share impressions and ideas on the new release.

Adam

Moody black and white macro shots

I was lucky enough to be diving at Capernwray last Sunday. Congratualtions to Darryl Leaning on completing five PADI Instructor Specialities. It was a very busy day, that ensured limited visibility, together with rain and cloud making underwater conditions very gloomy.

I used the conditions to experiment with black background macro shots-by keeping my aperture small, and using only the light from my strobe to illuminate the subject. I then converted these into mono, using Lightroom.

I quite like the result-the perch loook like boxers to me! Kind of bruised but still with attitude!

Taking the bow!

Wetpixel Flikr Group

I am an administrator of Wetpixels Flickr group, and have been spending some time recently adding and inviting images to it. It is a spin off from the Wetpixel site, which to me mind is the best source for info on underwater photography available on the web. It now has 1462 members, and is one of the largest underwater photography groups on Flickr. Probabaly more telling, the group's pool now has some 23754 images!

A friend who has recently go into underwater photography was bemoaning the fact that he had a lot of great images, but never got to show them to anyone. Groups like this on Flickr are a great way of showcasing your pictures, and getting them to a wide audience! Best of all they are absolutely free! Even if you don't take pictures underwater yourself, the quality and variety of images on the group make for a fascinating visual feast! Join up today!

Walking in Eskdale, Lake District

I have been lucky to have had a week off, travelling first down to North Devon to visit my parents. They have moved and run a fantastic Bed and Breakfast, at Chittlehamholt, very close to the fantastic beaches and scenery of the North Devon coast. Their www site is here. Caron and I took the dogs down with us and had fantastic walks along the beach at Saunton and at Instow

We then travelled up and spebnt a few nights in Eskdale, close to Wastwater, in the Lake District. Again, we travelled with the dogs, so spent our time walking with them. Caron's sister and brother in law (Caroline and Rob) joined us with their dogs too-so we had quite a pack. I took these pictures while we were walking up around Irton Pike, one of the view towards the coast (as a panorama) and the other looking up into Wasdale

Seth playing in the sea (and Jacob looking cute!)

I've added some pictures from earlier this summer to my pets and animals page on my web site We went down the the slipway at high tide on a sunny day and messed about! Seth enjoyed fetching his ball out of the waves an Jacob just chilled out being cute!

More 60mm f2.8 pictures

Some more shots from yesterday. The bokeh on this lens really impresses me

Gnarly old trout!

Congratulations to Scott Evans for completing his PADI Digital Underwater Photography and EANx specialities yesterday. DUP is of course an excellent excuse for me to get my camera in the water at the same time! I was trying out my "new" Nikkor 60mm f2.8. I got it at the same time as my 105mm VR and it has played second fiddle to the longer lens for a while. I have found that it is a REALLY sharp lens, that focuses fast and is a great length for fish portaits.

While diving with it yesterday here at Capernwray, I found this battered old brown trout. Trout, when they reach a certain age, develop a pronounced hook jaw (when they are called a kype), and in the last stages of their lives, darken in colour.

I've added more pictures from the day to my www site here

Morecambe Bay sunset HDR

Slave strobes at Capernwray

A black and white shot from the shoot with Alex that I mentioned earlier!

More black and white seal shots from the Farne Islands

Baitball bonanza

Baitball bonanza

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Black and White seal

Fantastic seal diving at the Farnes

As a part of Alex Mustard's Northern tour(!) we went to Northumberland to dive on the Farne Islands. This island chain is well known for it's playful seals and we went with the express intention of trying to photograph them. We joined Paul Walker's excellent rib and spent an amazing hour and a half playing, interacting and photographing these wonderful creatures. The first dive was characterised by seals biting and tugging on our fins, biting my dome port shade and strobes and generally showing how poor our buoyancy control and propulsion techniques are! Photographically, the conditions were perfect. Bright sunshine and shallow water, with relatively calm water made for some great scenic shots. I found getting the exposure correct challenging, the brightness of the surface was too great a contrast with the bottom. Camera angle relative to the sun, and framing are the key though!

The picture above is one of Alex's of me taking the mouth picture below! I'll feed more pictures from the dive onto this blog over the next few weeks. It was an amazing dive-world class!

Off camera flash and underwater photography

I've been involved in a project with Alex Mustard in using slave strobes to acheive an off camera type effect. We took some pictures at Capernwray last Wednesday, and I ws amazed at the results. We used a combination of a Heinrichs Weikamp slave strobe adaptor that triggered a Sea and Sea YS30 and in turn two big Subtronic strobes. In fact though I brought along a Firefly 1 slave set up, designed for use in dry caves, and put it into an Otter box. The results were excellent.I'll post some pictures here soon

Sepia tone in Lightroom

I took some trout pictures in Capernwray yesterday and whilst downloading them, started playing with the greyscale conversion in Lightroom and using the split toning function. One comment I have had about my Capernwray is that the pictures are too blue, so Ithought adding some greenish tint back into the black and white may work.

I'm not sure what do you think?

Sardine Run footage

Same more amazing footage from South Africas Sardine Run in 2007. I think this was taken from the BBC Natures Great Events series that aired here in the UK earlier this year. Stunning visuals, and narrated by Our Lord (!) David Attenborough.

My video on BBC

I am quite ridiculously proud of the fact that BBC news and News 24 used some stock segments of underwater video that I had shot at Capernwray last Wednesday. They used them to illustrate a section on the impact of the banking crisis on small business! Thye sprung the request on me on Tuesday, and I had to let them have some footage that I keep here for illustrating some points on our PADI Open Water course. Given that the clips were not my best work, I was pleased that they got used, and they did actually look really good on the broadcast.

Rightly or wrongly, seeing my footage on a national broadcast has really made me very chuffed!

Discovery Channel-more sensational rubbish

Discovery have launched another week of bad biology and sensationalist crap about sharks. Thay continue to vilify these apex predators in order to satisfy (or stoke) a perceived public need for gore on TV. Wolfang Leander makes an eloquent case-Discovery Channel

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Dusky Shark Emerges From Bait ball

Dusky Shark Emerges From Bait ball
Originally uploaded by jason-heller

And another......

Dusky Shark & Bait Ball

Dusky Shark & Bait Ball
Originally uploaded by jason-heller

Amazing sardine run pictures from this year by Jason Heller
Have a look at them all on his Flickr gallery here

Humpback whale by Jason Isley

Humpback whale
Originally uploaded by Jason Isley

Amazing shot!

Whale wars-Sea Shepherd in the Antartic

Disneys Oceans

Check out the preview for Disneys Oceans, scheduled for release on Earth Day 2010
http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=L93MT8VfDfk

The breeching whale sequence is awesome. If you would rather watch it in HD, check out here:

http://xrl.us/be48fv

The largest sardine run predator makes an appearance

Amazing footage of this years Sardine Run from the Earth Touch crew

The largest sardine run predator makes an appearance

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Diving with the good doctor

Last Friday, I was fortunate enough to go diving with Alex Mustard here at Capernwray. He was passing by on his way to a Scubapro event at Largs in Scotland. We did three dives-one of about and hour and ten minutes, a short one of 40 or so minutes and a final one of one hour twenty! It was a great experience to simply watch where he points his lens! I realise now that I have fallen into the classic trap of becoming too focused on the subject, and ignoring (to the pictures detriment) the light and scenery around it. Particularly with wide angle shots, and pretty clear shallow water, the light, sky and surroundings are as important for a good picture as is the subject being in focus!

This is a bit of a revelation! I guess I knew it all along, but had forgotten it! To be honest, I have been becoming a bit jaded with my underwater photography over the past couple of weeks, as many of my images seem to have become quite similar and predictable. Alex has just nudged me into how can shoot better and different images.

Lastly, we attempted to set up a particular image, in this case with no success due to some technical issues. What is becoming obvious is that great images are in part at least created rather than just captured.

Fish portait

Diving with free divers (and trying to photograph them!)

Sorry for my poor record in keeping this blog up-we are very busy at Capernwray with courses runing just about every day-and my laptop refuses to work underwater!

On Friday 26th, David Hack and I went off for a photo dive. It was some time since David took his camera underwater, so the idea was to work out a few kinks and get some time in underwater. We were joined for the latter portion of the dive by Rosie Hancock, who I had been doing the AIDA course with. I have long wanted to get some good images of free divers underwater-they look so good! Anyway, I found that getting the shots was more dificult than I thought. The best angles seem to be straight up-which causes all sorts of problems with exposure! I was trying to use the strobes to light Rosie, and expose for the background, but with a 1.4 x teleconvertor on, was finding that I had to back off to far for the strobes to light her up, or if I turned the strobes power up too much, lots of backscatter. Ok so learning point is to shoot with the 10-17mm Tokina, without the convertor off!

AIDA 2 star free diving Part 2

Rosie and I underwent the second part of our AIDA free diving course yesterday. We met Steve in the classroom at Capernwray, and sat the exam. Whilst it was not too taxing, it did check quite thoroughly whether I had been listening or not!

We then went into open water. We got weighted correctly and initially, it was just pulling down the line to 6m, and getting the feel for head first descents. Given my emphasis on good trim and body positioning on scuba, descending upside down and deliberately limiting my field of view felt very weird. We then progressed to 12m descents, I delayed equalising too long and had a few ear problems. These descents were "swimming" ones-not using the line to pull down, and duck diving from the surface. We both (I think) were finding that there was quite a bit of task loading. Trying to co-ordinate good diving style, finning technique, equalisation, "breathe ups" and body position during ascent and descent meant that I was unable to clear my mind and I think that this somewhat affected my performance.

Session 2 involved working up to some more depth. Rosie got down to over 17m, and I got to 15.5. I had a "good" learning experience when I tried to equalise, and some how managed to get some water in my mouth. Rather than do the obvious, and spit it out(!) I got a bit freaked out! Steve was with me (and actually supported my airway) so there was no risk as such, but it did spook me. It took a few dives for me to re-gain my confidence. Lastly, we looked at dealing with sambas (blackouts) at the surface-rescue techniques.

I was a little disapointed by my performance to be honest, and found that the clarity that came so easilly in the pool eluded. This may have been due to task loading, I don't think it was due to confidence in water. Once again though, Steve and team did a great job! Our final session is next Wednesday and am looking forward to it!

Free Diving AIDA 2 star

Rosie Hancock and I started our AIDA 2 star freediving course with Steve Millard on Sunday. We did a theory session-looking at the different competition disciplines, anatomy and physiology, nutrition, mind set and equipment for free diving. I have always breathed out during breath hold, and I have now found out why this is way bad! The breathe out "full" sensation is your bodies response to elevated CO2-by breathing out you are effectively lowering the P02, which could cause black-outs. In the afternoon, it was off to the pool for static and dynamic apnea sessions.

This was the really interesting part! Contrary to my expectations, your breath hold improves with repeated attempts (well up to about 5) The mammalian diving reflex is activated by repeated submersion, and it actually gets easier once it has kicked in. Anyway, my fourth attempt gave me a time of just under 3 mins, and Rosie's fifth 3:27. We then did static apnea, having spent some time practising turns and starts. I had a go with a mono fin-which I found quite straightforward. In scuba we used to teach a technique called dolphin kick, and the monofin works pretty much the same.

While we were in the pool 2 of Steve' s students acheived PB's for static apnea of 5 minutes- so we have some way to go!

Tomorrow we are writing the exam and doing some dives in open water. If equalisation goes OK, the plan is to get to 20m I believe!

I wanted to do this course for interest, and also to try and use the techniques as a stealth method of interacting with marine life, particuarly for photography. I used to spear fish years ago, and there is no doubt that the lack of bubbles and noise make marine life easier to approach. I'll continue to add to my blog as the course progresses, but so far, it has been not only interesting, but also suprised me in how my performance can improve with skilled tutelage

Sea Kayaking today

Caron and I went out for a paddle today. Force 5-6 winds limited our duration, but I actually managed to do some surfing in our new P&H Quest.

Marine Life Keywords for Lighroom or Aperture

One of the key problems that we as digital photographers face is keeping track of the vast numbers of images we produce. I took 10000 images last year, and remembering what I took when is a challenge. This results in missed opportunities for selling images, and frustrations in trying to view them!

I have found a solution for my underwater ones at least-keywording. By purchasing the Marine Life Keywords list, this will giva you a great head start into catalogueing and organising. This list of marine life species allows you to easily group your images into family or species group, allowing the amazing search functions in Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture to find your images.

It is now available to purchase ($99)-just click here!

Watch out for the humpback

More from the fantastic BBC Natures Great events series!

The DVD is out now on amazon. If anyone would like to buy me a (very) early Christmas present!

Diving yesterday

Antony Gatrell completed his Instructor Speciality courses with me at Capernwray yesterday. We were joined by Dave Morgan, and between us hence had three cameras on the go. It was a pretty bright day, so ideal for wide angle, so I chose to use a 105mm VR macro lens! Still quite like the results-I wasn't sure about the leaf picture, but I do quite like it!

Getting lost with Roger

David Kneale, Michael Ashworth and I put our faith in Roger Heron's usually keen sense of direction when we set out to do a Multilevel Adventure Dive last Saturday here at Capernwray. The plan was simplicity itself, so David and I tooled up with cameras and promised to be "bad buddies" while Roger and Michael led the way.

Well we turned left instead of right, and had a memorable dive along the weed festooned walls in "dappled" sunlight. It was very pretty, and we managed to save things at the last momment by re-tracing our steps. It was a great dive (even if not the planned one!)