I finally put a RAW editor for the Olympus Pen e-pl1 on my computer....

Aloha,
Well, it's about time. Unfortunately Adobe CS and CS3 don't support the Pen series of cameras, you need CS4 or later to find an update that'll support RAW editing for those cameras. The cameras come with Olympus' own editing and file management program. I'm working off two 4-5 year old computers and neither of them has a functioning DVD/CD drive, got on to Olympus' site this morning and downloaded their program. Yay. It's slower than Adobe's RAW editor, doesn't seem to do as many of the things I want to do, but it'll do 'til I get a new computer at some point in the future and load CS5 on to it.

I've only converted two shots so far, so I can't say much about the program. It does have a nice grey dropper white balance feature which works well for underwater shots... lots of greys on the reef with all of our hard corals. You can just put the dropper on a likely gray spot (OK, since this blog is read internationally I'm covering all my bases by interchangeablly using "gray" and "grey" I guess... Don't remember which one I should be using anymore) and click and the photo will hopefully go to it's natural color rather than the cyan/blue you typically get underwater. I should do some screen shots some day to show it. I tried it on a couple photos and they came out looking a bit too colorful, might have to tone down the saturation a bit on some pictures.

Here's a quick shot of a couple yellow tangs picking at algae amongst the finger corals. Tangs are herbivores and graze pretty much all day long. A lively reef will be coverered with numerous species of tangs.

Later,

Steve

A quick note.... Been scuba diving some this month...

I'm hanging out at the office again today, but I have charters tomorrow afternoon/eve, Saturday, Monday, Tuesday we've got double charters (am and night) so we're keeping fairly busy for now. My cash register arrived the other day, gotta figure out how to program it now.

The water's amazingly warm for January. We've been seeing 78 degrees - it's much more comfortable than the 72 or thereabouts we had last January. The whales are out in increasing numbers now, we're hearing them sing on a significant portion of the dives. I hope this is the year I finally get to see one underwater... Bob and Cathy have been hogging all the fun the last couple of years... it's a rare and exciting event when it does happen.

I'm on an old laptop I carry to the shop with me, so I don't have new photos to post, I'm trying to link a photo from some time ago on the blog... if it worked you're seeing a school of yellow tangs and whitespotted surgeons grazing on the reef. Surgeons/tangs are herbivores and pick algae off the coral, keeping everything nice and healthy. ....Ah, it seems there's a sizing issue with the photo I don't understand, still works anyway.

Later,

Steve

OK, I'm excited about white balance... just stumbled across...

a blog by a guy who's into photography and diving and found this post. Apparently Photoshop has had a white balance, a black balance and a gray balance dropper in their program all along... go to image>adjustments>levels and then look for the droppers in the lower right of the box that opens... whohoo!!!! You can experiment using this on photos that are bluish and get them much closer than you'll likely get them by other means unless you're really talented at Photoshop. I managed to "save" a few old photos in just a couple minutes' time that I couldn't do a whole lot with earlier.

Save your originals! You never know when you'll find out something that'll help you fix a problem you didn't think you could overcome.

Later,

Steve

It's Kona's slow season again...

Howdy,

People do on occasion ask what our slow seasons are. I've covered it before but it never hurts to repeat it. At least in this biz, it seems the slowest months are May, and September through late November (excluding the week either side of Ironman).

I've been on the call list for jury duty the last couple of weeks and it appears that Tuesday is the day for jury selection. I do have charters tomorrow and Monday, as well as earlier the last couple of weeks, so it seems the timing is right if I do get picked. I'll be going back to my part time job at the airport 'til it gets crazy busy again, they've been real flexible with me during the time I've been busy and I haven't worked with them in about 2 months.

Here's a school of tangs (surgeonfish) I ran across the other day. Tangs are herbivorous and do a good job of cleaning algae off the corals.

We've been reasonably busy with charters lately. We had a week of pretty crummy water - swells from both the north and south, along with winds - but the swells and winds and swells have calmed down and it's been gorgeous the last couple of days... that's how we like it here, and usually that is the case, we've just had some late season north swells lately. The manta action has been slow recently. Last year this time we were having record numbers. I expect with some calm conditions and better plankton levels than we've had lately, it'll pick up again - but you never know, we have no control over Mother Nature.

That's it for now. Later,

Steve