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

Recently our cat that we had for 12 years died after a very short, and very unexpected sickbed. From one day to the next you lose a dear companion. In the few months after, we noticed a difference in behavior from our remaining cat. He became even more introverted, scared, and wouldnt play anymore. In our minds this was because he was a follower, he would always follow our other cat and do what he did.

For the last few weeks we’ve been looking for another cat, and this weekend we found her. We visited a local shelter a few times, and on our last visit we found a very sweet, very calm female cat. We were a bit afraid of the reaction of our other cat, but things went extremely well. It’s now been 4 days and they are already cuddling on the couch. Our cat also has been playing again, chasing toys around the house as he used to. It’s amazing how his personally has switched around again.

We’ve still not named her. We like geeky names, that can still pass as somewhat normal. Our previous cat was called Cisco, and our current cat is Samba. Julie had a cat named Pearl. So..if anyone can think of a cat name that’s both geeky, but still passable for normal, let us know!

(edit: we picked the name Ruby, which is a programming language)

Yesterday a very helpful Dell employee came to my house to replace my XPS700 motherboard with an XPS720. This was a free upgrade that Dell started to provide XPS700 owners with a better upgrade path for additional hardware. I also ordered a Quad Core CPU with it, which came with a 25% discount. Pretty cool deal.

After about an hour, the guy leaves, and it looks like I have a working system again. That is, until after another hour or so I notice a new hard disk I didnt have before. I immediately knew what happened. He had rebooted the machine without configuring the raid controller on the new board. My boot disk is actually a raid1/mirror and you need to tell the new raid controller that. Instead, it booted with 2 separate identical drives. Ofcourse, after the initial boot these 2 drives can no longer be seen as identical and I was unable to recreate the raid1 volume.

So you think.. no problem. I take the C drive and make that the first drive in a new raid1 volume. That worked. Now I had a degraded raid 1 volume which was missing its second drive. Good, i have the second drive, so now I can add the second drive and tell the raid controller to rebuild the raid volume. Right? Wrong! More »

Julie won a second place in the Underwater Art section of the new contest by Australasia Scuba Diver magazine. She won a nice liveaboard price with an image of a pipe fish shot in Indonesia.

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.

In the last few weeks i’ve started using Lightroom and have really come to like it. It’s a perfect (ok, not really perfect) mix of editing and management that really improves my workflow and thus my time spent in boring work (ie: not taking photos). One thing that bugged me was that it was such a hassle to get photos out of Lightroom and into my online image hosting site that part of our website works on.

That is, until I found the Post Processing options in Lightroom, and the easy way it allows you to hook in internal tools into Lightroom when you export images from your Lightroom Library. I’ve written a HowTo on the SmugMug support site explaining how to integrate Lightroom with SmugMug.

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 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.

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.

We admit it, we’re geeks. We named our cat Cisco. We got him in 1994, and for 13 years he’s been the light of our life. This cat has an amazing personality and allowed us to stay in his kingdom. On july 7th we had to let him get peace, after a short sickbed. It was one of the hardest things we have done.

We’ll never forget some of his crazier moment. Like the time he managed to wrap a plastic bag around his tail and ran around the house being chased by a bag. Or the time he kept coming home with little dead chicks, and we had to sneak after him to find out someone several blocks over was feeding them to him because they were old and couldn’t separate our cat from theirs. Or when he used to make a god awful noise at night because he wanted to get out, and he would position himself just so all his howls would somehow harmonize and double in volume. Or the way he would curl up between us at night and would glare at us if one of us dared to move. The way we would say “EARTHQUAKE” to each other when he would jump off something upstairs and shake the house. Or the last time we cuddled with him before we had to bring him to the vet for his final trip.

We’ll remember all of it.

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.

When you travel as much as we do, you quickly accumulate a huge amount of photos. Even though we do our best to catalog and keyword our images as we take them, we are continuously behind in cataloging our images. Not only that, we also have a large backlog of thousands of images.

Couldn’t this be something you can outsource? I’ve been thinking about just that, but it’s probably quite difficult. You need to find someone that is knowledgeable about marine life or is capable of looking up species in books or on the Internet. As if that wasn’t hard enough, you also have to trust this person with your images. Maybe we’ll find someone one day, but I’m not holding my breath.