It’s always a bit exciting when you get something published for the first time. I just saw the latest issue of Sport Diver magazine at our regular dive shop Cane Bay Dive Shop with two of my images in it. Sport Diver regularly does an image callout to a selection of underwater photographers, and we joined this list a few months ago after they invited. When they asked for some images of St Croix I submitted some, and included some from other places as well. They printed two of my images.  Very cool. I hope this will not be the last, as I must admit that Sport Diver pays very well for a dive magazine.

Here’s the two images. One is a Lemon Shark from the Bahamas. The other a Frog Fish at the St Croix pier.

I wrote a small article about how to photograph mating hamlets for DuikenInBeeld, an online magazine. It was the first time we ever tried shooting hamlets, even though they were right under our noses for years in the Virgin Islands where we stay every winter.

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.

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.

Julie has the cover of Scuba Diver Australasia for issue 4 of 2007. It’s an image of a kid in Indonesia playing with us under water. Julie also has a portfolio in the same issue.

Julie has the cover of the august issue of Duiken Magazine. In the same issue is an article about Dragonets and their mating habits written by Cor.

Cor has written another article for Duiken Magazine, this time about searching for macro critters. We have become quite adept at finding small macro life, which came in handy on our latest trip to Komodo where we found lots of undescribed species. The article shows some simple guidelines you can follow to improve your chances of finding small macro life.

You can read the article on our articles page.

The februari issue of Duiken Magazine has an article written by Cor about Digital Asset Manegement. As digital photographers have more and more images, some form of management is a must if you want to be able to find a needle in the haystack.

You can read the article on our PDF article page.