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

We just finished up the Wetpixel trip to the Solomon Islands. It was a really nice trip with a great group of people. We had some beginning shooters, but most people were pretty advanced photographers. We all had a blast, and not a day went by without some small prank, joke, or otherwise hilarious event. For more about the trip check out our tripreport.

Julie and I just returned from the Bahamas trip with Eric Cheng. We had an amazing time diving with Tiger Sharks, countless Lemon Sharks, and Dolphins. Read our trip report of this trip. I also added two trip reports of our previous trips to Indonesia visiting Raja Ampat and Komodo.

I’ve written a review before about the StiX arm system for underwater photography. The creator of that system, John Zeiss, is a great guy that really listens to suggestions. Several people have asked if he can make his buoyancy floats in black instead of white. So of course he did.

You may be wondering why anyone would care, are we that fashion conscious? The reason for black floats is that white floats look a lot like tasty little fishy morsels to a hungry shark. If you’re doing a trip like we’re doing with Tiger Sharks you really want dark floats.

We have put another gallery online, this time with our photo’s from our last trip to Raja Ampat and Komodo. It was a very long trip, starting in Indonesian Guinea, through the Banda Sea, down to Flores, and from there to Komodo and finally to Bali. It took almost 4 weeks, but it was an extremely fun and productive trip.

We saw many critters that we’d not seen before, including a lot of nudibranchs, juvenile batfish, hairy octopus, and many more. The area around Komodo now ranks as our favorite dive destination.

You can see these and other images in our galleries section.

You want to do a deep dive, but you don’t want to go outside. Julie and I did just that today at a place called Nemo33. Located in Brussels, a 2 hour drive from our home, Nemo has a 110 feet (33 meters) deep pool, with several platforms at 15 and 30 feet, and an actual air chamber around 30 feet. I went there to make sure my dentist had fixed a broken tooth correctly and didn’t leave an airspace, instead of finding out somewhere in the middle of the ocean that they had.

Even though the concept of Nemo sounds cool, and I suppose in some ways it is cool, I think it lacks a lot of features. They don’t allow any use of personal gear besides fins/mask, which also includes camera gear. So no pressure testing of expensive housings, or just doing a practice buoyancy dive with a new housing. But it was still fun to do a deep dive in a pool, something that you can’t really do anywhere else in the world.

On the way back from Nemo we visited Gouda, where fellow Wetpixel member James Wiseman was staying for a few days while visiting Holland.

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.

We’ve returned from our trip to Komodo. It was by far the best trip Julie and I ever did. Not only did we have great people on board, including Eric Cheng, Norbert Wu and Andy Sallmon, we also got to see many critters we’ve never seen before. Horseshoe Bay is now our most favorite dive site.

Not only did we see cool stuff underwater, we also saw a Komodo Dragon in the wild. As it entered the beach we were anchored at we rushed to shore and took some photo’s. The dragon was quite nervous but let us get really close.

The Kararu explorer was a nice boat, even though it seems to lack a bit in maintenance. We had a lot of equipment failures, which was quite annoying. But the amazing wildlife makes up for it, so we’ll go back anytime.

Julie and I joined Fathoms on a trip from Raja Ampat, through the Banda Sea, to Flores. On paper this trip sounded really nice, and mostly it was very nice diving. What we had not realised was the amount of steaming we had to do, which greatly reduced our number of possible dives. We had 3 full days of steaming, and many 10+ hour voyages.

Not only was there a lot of moving, the boat also had a lot of trouble. On day three the nitrox failed because the main generator died. So now we’re not only limited in the number of dives, but also in bottom time. Since a lot of the dives are done in the 50-80 feet range, this really impacted our diving.

Visiting the Banda Islands was quite nice though, and so was snake island, an island that is home to thousands of sea snakes.

We’re joining Eric Cheng on one of his expeditions to the Solomon Islands. Because we like the Bilikiki so much we’ve decided to add two trips to that, one before and one after Eric’s trip, for a total of four weeks of diving.

Read more about Eric’s trip on the Wetpixel expedition page.

In july 2007 we’re going on a trip with Eric Cheng to the Bahamas. This trip will features Tiger Sharks and Dolphins, two animals that Julie and I have not seen before underwater. We’re really looking forward to it.

For more information check out the wetpixel expeditions page.

For the first time both of us placed in a contest at the same time. Julie placed third in the Wetpixel Our World Underwater contest, while Cor placed third in the Wetpixel Deep Indonesia contest. Cor also had an honorable mention in the OWU contest. Our prices were quite nice and included a camera + housing + printer and two dive suits.

The price winners can be seen here.