Welcome to Cor & Julie's journal

Photography Corner (Diving, Photography, Published)

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.

Smugmungous (Diving, Photography, Published)

smugmug.gifThe 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.

Two new articles online. (Diving, Photography, Published)

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.

Wetpixel Quarterly (Diving, Photography, Published)

5e395d7f-28bc-4b4f-a205-13602d95d8f4.jpgJulie 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.

Sunset in the caribbean (Horses, Photography)

 In the winter Julie and I head to the US Virgin Islands to visit Julie’s mother. In the past we did a lot of diving during those weeks, but in the last two years we’ve started horse riding. It’s a nice change from riding at home in an arena. Here we can ride freely, on the beach and through the hills. Today we went to the top of a small hill to watch the sunset over the North Shore of St Croix. It doesn’t get much better.

This is Julie’s favorite horse named Pirate. It’s a stallion, that most people that ride here can’t handle, but somehow Julie manages with her soft touch.

New cover for Julie (Diving, Photography, Published)

cover_jan

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.

Back home to the Virgin Islands (Diving, Horses, Photography)

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’re going back to Tiger Beach (Diving, Photography)

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!

New gallery online (Diving, Photography)

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

Julie wins prize at Antibes Underwater Festival (Diving, Photography)

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!

Trips to the Solomons (Diving, Photography)

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.

Wetpixel trip to the Solomons (Diving, Photography)

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.

Three new trip reports online (Diving, Photography)

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.

shark

New StiX product (Diving, Photography)

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.

Photo’s from our trip to Raja Ampat and Komodo online (Diving, Photography)

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.