You never know what to expect when you dive. During a dive in Indonesia I suddenly saw a sponge spawning. The event only lasted for a few minutes, but I was able to capture some images. It was the first time I ever saw this with my own eyes.

It’s always nice to win a prize in a competition. We don’t enter that many, actually only two this year, but you always hope one of your images will do well. One of the honors I hadn’t received yet was a Best of Show, until now. I got the BoS at the Underwater Images competition.

The image is of a Lizardfish being cleaned by a small goby taken in the US Virgin Islands. It was a coincidence that I even took the image. We had entered the water to take photos of mating hamlets at dusk. On our way to the spot where we had seen Hamlets we crossed some coral heads, and on one of them I noticed a Lizardfish with its mouth open. At first I figured I was too late, but as I got closer it just stayed there. For the next 15 minutes the goby kept coming back to clean this Lizardfish, and I got quite a few shots. Eventually it became too dark and I stopped, but it was a very cool experience.

At wetpixel.com, where I am a co-admin, there is a weekly contest called ‘Photo of the Week‘. Every wetpixel community member can upload some images, and everyone can vote for the winner. This is producing some incredible photo’s, and over the year a set of images that can rival almost anything out there. To increase the exposure of these images I have created a Facebook application called ‘Underwater Photo Of The Week’. It lets you add the POTW to your profile, and lets you see all the previous winners.  Now potentially millions of people can see these amazing photo’s straight from Facebook.

I’ve also made a WordPress widget, which allows people running WordPress to add the POTW to their blog. You can see that in action in our own journal.

In the last few years, images of mating Hamlets have turned up in several publications. Julie and I love watching natural behavior, but we’ve never really taken the time to go out and photograph Hamlets. St Croix is actually a very good place to do this, as there are different species of Hamlets here, and lots of them. So we finally went out last night to see what all the hubhub is about.

We didn’t really know what to expect. We’ve photographed mating behavior of other species before, and some species, like for instances Dragonets can be really difficult to approach. So we were ready to stalk our prey and stop breathing. None of this turned out to be necessary. The Hamlets were completely oblivious to our presence and at times would actually swim within two feet of us by themselves. Their mating session lasted for about 30 minutes, during which they went up into the water column about a dozen times to mate. It was quite interesting to watch.

So here it is, my very first image, shot when they went up the first time.

I was contacted to provide a portfolio for Photography Corner, a photography website. They do a regular portfolio section of customers of SmugMug and the people from Smugmug send them over to our website. You can see the result here.

The people at Smugmug asked us to provide them with a portfolio of images to show off their new Smugmungous theme. This new theme stretches across the whole monitor and looks especially stunning on large monitors. They used the images in media events and on their website. Check out the smugmungous images here.

I put two new articles online (dutch only) from Duiken Magazine. I wrote these articles in the end of 2007 and Duiken allows me to put the pdf’s online after a few months, which is very nice of them. They even provide me with the published pdf files. I wish all magazines would do that!

You can read the articles about Dragonets and the Banda Sea in our Publications section.

Julie and I have been pretty active in the last few years on Wetpixel, one of the best underwater photography sites. We are both staff members now, and help out where we can in running the site.

Eric Cheng, the founder of Wetpixel has recently started a magazine called “Wetpixel Quarterly. The second issue remembers the amazing photography of the legendary Jim Watt, who passed away way too early. It also contains portfolio’s of most of wetpixel staff members, including Julie and myself. We’re obviously very proud to be in such a quality publication.

If you’re interested in a subscription visit the Wetpixel Quarterly website.

In September/October of 2007 Julie and I went to Indonesia on a long trip through the Banda Sea. We visited some very remote islands, some of which have a very notorious history. Especially the Banda Islands themselves were fascinating. These islands are known as the spice islands, and many sea battles were fought over its riches in the 16/17/18th century.

I wrote a 4 page story about the trip which can be read in Duiken Magazine, and will be available as a pdf in a few weeks with this article.

What is even cooler is that Julie got the cover of the January issue with a nice image of 2 boys coming to pose underwater.

Every year Julie and I go to the Virgin Islands for about three months to visit Julie’s mother. Unfortunately it’s really warm there as well, while here in Amsterdam it’s cold, rainy and gloomy. But we’ll just have to sacrifice ourselves. We’ll be on the island of St Croix, which is by far the nicest of the US Virgin Islands. Ok, maybe St John is nicer, but just too small for us.

We normally do some diving there, but last year we actually got into horse riding as well. We know a local cowboy there who we helped out taking care of about 15 horses. We had a blast, so hopefully we can do that again this year. We started to take more advanced riding lessons here in Amsterdam just for that occasion.

VI, see you in January!

We had so much fun in the Bahamas diving with Tiger sharks and Dolphins that we decided to go again. Julie actually decided to go two trips, because she wants to try the Oceanic Whitetips as well. What she really means is that she wants to take photos of the wild pigs they found last year, that would come out to the waters edge so you can take split shots. Not my thing. So for the first time in, well, forever, we’re not going on a dive trip together. I’ll meet up with her for the second trip which is the Tiger Sharks trip. Can’t wait, we had so much fun last time.

These Lemon Sharks are always getting in the way of your Tiger Shark shots!

We just put a new gallery online containing some of our Solomon Islands images. You can see this gallery here.

It’s the holy grail for many underwater photographers, a prize at Antibes. This year has only been the second year we have entered it, but never did we think either of us would win a price. The best of the best enter this contest. It came as a very unexpected, but pleasant, surprise that Julie won a prize in the portfolio section. Officially named “PRIX APNEA – Meilleure image d’apnée”, I suppose it could be translated as ‘best image of a free diver’. This same image has been a cover for ‘Australasian Scuba Diver’ magazine as well, so it’s been a successful image for Julie. Congrats!

We recently came back from three dive trips to the Solomon islands for a total of 30 days of diving. The second trip was a wetpixel trip organized by Eric Cheng. Julie and I are moderators of wetpixel, so it was really nice to meet Eric and several other wetpixel people again. We’ve had the tripreport of the wetpixel trip online for a while, but I just put the other 2 reports online.

• Trip 1, with 11 people.
• Trip 2, the wetpixel trip
• Trip 3, with only 7 people