Ghost shrimp and current Kona Hawaii scuba diving conditions...

Yay!

Finally, I've got Adobe CS5 on my computer at the shop, and after an update download my camera I bought last year has RAW support... this means, maybe I'll start taking my camera back in the water. I realized the other day that after a year without the camera in the water, I forgot how it works. I didn't even have the zoom/focus ring in the housing so I was pretty much stuck with wide angle, couldn't remember how to change the camera into macro, all sorts of photo mishaps ensued. I did manage to get this ghost shrimp photo though. It was down at 92 feet and this was taken without any type of flash and no zoom control. If you'd see the original photo, it'd be very blue and lacking in detail or color, the nice thing with RAW and underwater photography is that you can set the white balance after the fact and there's a real decent chance in getting the orginal colors back.

Ghost shrimp are also known as Fountain Shrimp in many parts of the world, named after the foutainous spray of their antennae I guess. They're a pretty decent sized reef shrimp, not eatin' size, but big compared to what we usually see.

We've had a pretty good south swell lately, with a fair amount of west in it on occasion. South we can deal with, west can be a problem if it's big enough. From the dive shop I can see things are kind of washed out near Honokohau Harbor (yesterday they were just fine). Tomorrow we have 3 intro divers and a couple of certified divers on the boat, hopefully it'll settle down by then. One of the very nice things about Kona diving is that because of the lack of soil at water's edge, it can be stirred up one day and cleared up the next if the surf settles down. Sand, the limited amount that there is on the reefs here, settles out very fast and we can have 100+ foot viz the day after having poor viz.

Yesterday's diving gave me the first 79 degree reading for an entire dive that I've had this year. Things are finally starting to warm up. It never got "cold" here (by our standards) this winter, but it has yet to really start getting warmer either. Last year it maxed out at about 79 degrees, I'm hoping we see 80/82 later this summer and into the fall. The warmer water temperatures often will hold out through November and early December.

Camera RAW and underwater photography with my Canon G9

So I'm sitting at my computer and wanted to look at a document and see that I had a couple of RAW pictures in the file that I hadn't looked at. I thought I'd updated Photoshop lately and maybe they now support the RAW format my camera uses, I opened Photoshop and the pictures do now show.

For those of you who don't know what RAW is, basically consider it as a "digital negative" which holds all the information the camera sees at the time, no JPEG compression and such. Not all cameras offer RAW, but it's becoming more common in the higher end point and shoot cameras these days. It takes up a lot of memory compared to JPEG, but if you have an editor to open it (without the editor, you will see nothing as computers don't automatically recognize RAW) with, it'll do a lot of things easily that are tough to do in JPEG (at least tough if you are like me and not a Photoshop whiz).

The picture above is this picture after a quick trip through the RAW editor in Photoshop. With the RAW editor you can use a few quick toggles to adjust your white balance, blacks, contrast, clarity, and a couple other goodies and have a pretty good picture to send to your regular Photoshop screen in the press of a button. In this case all I did with the picture at the top was tweak it for 20 seconds or so in RAW then click to send it to the regular editor to crop (bottom is also a crop of a larger picture) and do a slight sharpen unmask and a resize.

This looks like a VERY easy way to get around underwater white balance. I'll try shooting more RAW to see if that's the case.

Speaking of shooting pics underwater.... I wanna dive.... I've had a sinus thing going on for about a month and have been doing nothing but Captaining lately. I had read on a message board a few weeks back a thread about saline sinus rinses, people were raving about them opening up thier sinuses and some even thought it helped with their equalization troubles. Two days ago I had a physician's assistant on board and mentioned the sinus issue and was recommended to try a "netti" pot. Now this may be more info than you want to know, but I picked one up. You can think of it as a nasal enema, but you might prefer to think of it as more of a tea party where nobody else showed up so you stick the spout up your nose and pour just to see what happens (not that I've ever done that). Anyway, it's sort of gross, but after all the raves about it on the scuba diving board I thought I'd pass it along in case anyone's having sinus issues, it may help. If you still can't quite figure it out, go to Youtube.com and do a search for netti pot, there's lots of visual examples there. Hopefully it'll work for me and I'll be back to leading dives, or at least diving for photos, shortly.

The above pic is of a Filefish that is being cleaned by a Hawaiian Cleaner Wrasse.

Aloha,

Steve