Adam Hanlon's web journal lists my thoughts, musings,and displays some of the pictures from my web site at www.adamhanlon.com. I am primarily an underwater photographer, and offer stock and bespoke underwater photography via hanlon photography.
I am also a PADI Course Director and work full time at Capernwray Diving, Lancaster UK.
If you thought shark finning was exclusively a Chinese problem, think again. Welcome to Kesen-numa City, Japan's shark fin capital.
Here, six days a week, small teams of Japanese workers go about the hushed business of industrial shark-finning.
By 6.30am, with piles arranged, the sharks are disemboweled first. Hearts are ripped efficiently from bodies by men wearing brightly coloured rubber boots and aprons. At 7am, shark corpses are cleaned of their blood by workers wielding water hoses. And by 8am, small teams are silently moving up and down aisles and rows like robots in a Japanese car factory, quickly slicing off every dorsal, pectoral and tail fin from the lifeless, grey lumps. Big hungry black crows squawk in the shadows, looking for bloody morsels. And shark fins plop with regularity into small yellow plastic baskets. The baskets fill up fast, are then weighed, and finally carried to a nearby truck, where a man with a notepad strikes a deal. At 9.30am, it's all over for another day. Fork lift trucks scoop up tons of limbless carcasses, then dump them into a high-sided truck. The process is a brutal sight to behold, and not for the faint-hearted.
The fishing port of Kesen-numa City is located in Miyagi Prefecture in North East Japan, and is the country's only port dedicated to catching sharks.
Over two days in early July this year, I saw 119 tons of blue shark (Prionace glaucaof), ten tons of salmon shark (Lamna ditropis), and three tons of short fin mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus) landed on the dock at Kesen-numa. Not to mention several tons of endangered bluefin tuna, (Thunnus thynnus), but that's a whole other story. Taking government transparency to another level, landed shark tonnage numbers are provided daily by the port of Kesen-numa's Japanese only website, which is publicly, (and apparently unashamedly), available.
Could a new battle between marine conservationists battling to save the sharks and the Japanese fishing lobby be on the horizon? First there was the annual showdown in the Southern Ocean between the Japanese whaling fleet and the environmental groups Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd to save the whale. Then there was the runaway success of the Oscar-winning documentary 'The Cove'. One would think the tide is slowly turning. Is it not time Kesen-numa City, Japan's dirty little shark secret, was shut down next?
I have some late availability for a week-long live aboard trip, concentrating on following the large schools that form around Ras Mohamed. The boat is Snapdragon-I have just spent two weeks on her, and she is excellent! The itinerary will be flexible, allowing the option of going where the action is! The boat will depart/return to Sharm el Sheikh, and the cost is £750. Please contact me for more details!
I'm just adjusting back to normal life after two weeks in the Red Sea, on board Snapdragon with Red Sea Snapper Safaris. It was an amazing two weeks! Lots of great diving and amazing photographic opportunities. I have narrowed the 2000 or so images down, and plan to start getting some of them on-line over the next week or so.
Many thanks to Pete, Duncan and all the Snapdragon crew. We have spaces for our July trip still and it promises to be even better! Please contact me if you are interested.
I have three spaces left on a charter scheduled from the 4th-11th July from Sharm el Sheikh. The idea behind this safari is to catch up with the large aggregations of schooling fish off Fisherman's Shoal (near Jackfish Alley) and try and pick up some of the action with the Oceanic blacktip sharks that come in to harry these shoals. Saying all this, this charter is not running to any "conventional" itinerary. Unlike the major operators, we will go where the action is-we aren't tied in to any package tour like schedule, so where it is good-we'll be there!
We will be using MV Orchid, and are planning to only put 10 people on a boat that normally charters with 16-so there will be plenty of room! If you are interested, please get in touch soon!
I shot some more pictures of the 'plane this morning early. The visibility was improved compared to last Monday, but the ambient light was still a little too dark to get the whole thing in
Shot in ambient light with a green water Magic filter. The pictures were processed in Lightroom 3 beta 2-the noise reduction features are amazing!
This is a rough cut of actual footage of G-BVOV underwater at Capernwray. It was shot on Monday 29th March 2010. The crane strops are still in place, and in actual fact, it was still being lowered onto the bottom of the quarry!
Some of this footage was used by Grenada and BBC North West on their evening bulletins.
On Monday 29th, my place of work, Capernwray Diving plan to sink the largest object in a inland dive site in the UK. G-BVOV a Hawker Siddley HS748 passenger airliner will slip (!) under the water. She has a 35m wingspan, and a 30m fuselage and weighs about 9 tons. We have hired the largest crane available in the area to lift her in!
I'll be on hand and in the water to catch this, both on still and video. Non diving spectators are welcome to come and see her last flight-the site will open at 10.00am and the plan is to start the lift at midday.
REEF have just announced that they are taking pre-orders for the second DVD in the Sensational Seas series It is available to order here Shipping is expected on April 1st.
All proceeds from the DVD (which has been made using donated clips) go the Reef foundation-which supports Ocean conservation efforts.
These were taken over a week (?) during which the participants gave up diving during daylight-diving solely at night. They were based at the "home" of macro -Lembeh These are some of the fantastic images that resulted!
After reading a post on wetpixel by Stephen Frink (see the post here) on using a small dome with macro lenses, I thought I'd give the Zen dome a try.
I used with a Nikon 60mm f2.8, on a very dark and gloomy day. For reference purposes, the water temp was 4 degrees, and I lost all sensation in my hands for most of the dive (despite dry gloves!) The port gives really nice results-sharp and it corrects the parallax that you get with conventional flat ports. I will definitely try it some more
Caron and I loaded up the dogs and went off for a walk around the Walna Scar Road, Coniston. It was a fantastic snowy cleat day, with awesome views back towards home and the coast. The dogs had a great time playing in the snow!
A great piece of video, made all the more remarkable by the fact that some of it was shot using a Canon 5D MkII digital SLR. Apart from showing the skill of the film maker, it also shows how far along these cameras have come in terms of video output.
I wish Nikon would get their offerings sorted out to compete!
Alex Tattersall's Underwater Visions site is now up here This brings Nauticam housings officially to the UK. They are certainly the most talked about new housings for a long time, and seem to offer a plethora of features. I like the idea of being able to use existing ports on them, a solid locking port system, and the idea that misaligned controls will "mesh" themselves. Neat engineering!
I mentioned in a post earlier that I had been playing and trying to get my head around integrate all the social media that I seem to be involved with. I have twitter, facebook, blogger and my web site, and to update all of them separately could take hours!
Smugmug, where my site (adamhanlon.com)is hosted have just launched a tool known as smart galleries. By adding keywords to images, it gathers these together in a gallery for you-as virtual images. They also have a "show off" facility that allows you to generate slideshows like the one below automatically!
I've used twitterfeed to gather the feed from this blog, and hopefully to publish it to twitter and facebook.
I'm using it for close focus wide angle (CFWA) and wide angle macro (WAM) to get round the problems of trying to light things that are very close to the dome port. I'm shooting DX with my D2Xs in a subal Housing and have been using a Tokina 10-17 for some time. I've set the dome up with a 30mm extender, which seems OK, but this may well need additional adjustment.
My first impression of the dome was quite how small it is! When compared with an 8" dome it seems really tiny! It also seems very well made and finished.
In use, for CFWA, with a Kenko 1.4x converter, you can really feel the magnification working! You can get the front of the dome so close to the subject that you really can feel the magnification "pulling" the subject in:
Practically, this means as long as you can physically get the strobes in close enough, that lighting is fairly easy! With dry gloves, the strobes want to be where my hands are! The reduction in distance between the front of the dome and the subject helps with colour and sharpness.
For more general wide angle, I took the following series of shots. These were all shot at 1/60th which may be a bit slow, and I am getting used to the set up-so please don't take them as anything like definitive! The full image looks like this:
I've then taken crops of the left hand bottom corner, and zoomed them to 100%
1/60th at f5
1/60th at f6.3
1/60th at f7.1
1/60th at f8
1/60th at f9
1/60th at f10
Corner sharpness seems to suffer at large apertures!
I'll do some more playing-please note that these aren't definitive.
Today I was lucky enough to be using the new Zen 100mm dome port today. It is definately softer in the corners than a big dome, but it's small size lets you get real close! Thanks to Alex for all his help with this
I teamed it up with a Tokina 10-17mm lens and a Kenko 1.4 x teleconverter, and could really see the magnification's effect on the subject. Lighting is critical though-my Inon strobes when correctly placed, didn't really leave enough room for my dry gloves!
The ability to get the subject so close is a definate advantage in terms of colour in green water. The subjects are much more vibrant out of the camera than they would be with a bigger dome etc.
While I was shooting, the sun went in, and I found that as I stopped down, the corner sharpness got worse!
I'm putting together a photography specific liveaboard trip to the Northern Red Sea in July this year.
At this time of year, large schools are forming around Ras Mohamed, which should provide some fantastic opportunities! It is at about this time that the fish move from Fisherman’s bank (off Jackfish Alley) to Shark Reef, Ras Mohamed. It is also when the pelagic blacktip sharks can turn up to add a bit of extra excitement! We have chartered the boat MV Orchid, and are planning for a maximum of 10 people on board. As it is our charter, we will operate on a reactive itinerary, basically going where the action is!
Orchid is re-fitting, and should have camera rinse tanks and camera tables installed by this trip.
The dates are 4th-11th July, 6 nights on board, with the last night in a hotel. The trip is from and to Sharm el Sheikh, which is well served with flights from Europe and further afield.
The trip cost is £(UKP)750, excluding flights. This will include all accommodation, all food and drink (non alcoholic) on board the boat, transfers to and from the airport and all diving. I can also organize flights if people would like me to do so. For those of you in the Northern UK, flights ex Manchester are £399.
If you are interested, would like more information, or to book(!) please let me know.
I've been doing a lot of looking, reading and hopefully learning about the ways that you can integrate blogs, twitter and in this case, my Smugmug web site at adamhanlon.com In particular, wetpixel publisher, Eric Cheng (www.echeng.com) and contributors Cor Bosman (underwa.ter.net/) and Tony Wu (www.tonywublog.com) have unwittingly provided me with ideas and inspiration! Now all I need is time!
Cor has embedded a slideshow of one of his Smugmug galleries, and seeing the results, it looks great. So I thought I would try and do the same! This is a slideshow of a fantastic underwater adventure at the Farne Islands last September, when we were the center of attention for some very rowdy seals! I hope you enjoy it!
This picture was made picture of the day on the Flickr FINS group.
It was shot at Capernwray on a sunny day, with an air temperature of -7 degrees celsius, and a water temperature of 3/4 degrees. There was some ice on the surface!
I was very happy to have had an article published in UWP mag in the December/January issue. UWP is a free on line magazine that is published by Peter Rowlands. It is a great specific resource for underwater photographers, and the quality of the articles is often quite high.
The cold weather and cold water combination has really cleared out the visibility at Capernwray. These were taken last Friday, water temperature was 3 degrees, air temperature -7!
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