In the middle of a long stretch of workdays....here's an underwater video...

Haven't posted in a bit. Here's a quick video I took while playing around between dives for a minute. We've been having back to back swells come in so the viz has been a bit down on several of our dives, call it 70-80 feet on the bad days in some spots, more in others. The video makes it look worse than it was, it was a cloudy day and the quality's not quite what it should be.

Later,

Steve

Testing...facebook video embedding... plus whale song sounds on underwater video...

OK, now that seemed to work.

Today was a great day out on the water. We had an 8-10 foot northwest swell so we decided to head south and go around the corner of Kaiwi point and dive sharkfin rock and Pawai Bay for the day, it was nice and relatively calm in there. The divers came up from the first dive very excited about all the whale singing, so when we moved over to the second dive site I took a "captain's dive" while they had lunch on their surface interval with Cathy.

Boy were the whales loud!!! I half way expected them to show up out of the blue at any time. Turn up the volume and listen between my breaths on this video and you can hear them. The sound of the whales through the camera housing doesn't do them justice, it was quite loud underwater.

While the divers were on their second dive I was up top on the boat and had a couple of whales swam to within 30 feet or so of the boat... very cool. They went right towards where Cathy had taken the group but probably cut outside when they hit the corner our group was around so the divers missed them.

This video clip is of a Lined Butterfly (Chaetodon lineolatus). These are Hawaii's largest butterflyfish species, reaching up to a foot or so in length. We typically see them in pairs, this one's partner was just a few feet out of the shot.

Aloha,

Steve

Boy, do I do my share of dumb things.... Plus an underwater slideshow...

Yesterday Pat and I were going to go out on a little holo holo adventure on the boat.... ended up spending a large part of the day at the ER. I'm mostly in bed for the next few days with a torn hamstring. Ice, ibuprophen, hydrocodone and lots of sleep are what I have to look forward to for the next day or so. I get a new set of crutches out of the deal though. I'm hoping I'm only on them for a few days and can get back to walking speed shortly.

I hobbled to the computer to check my mail, and as long as I'm up I thought I'd try posting a short slideshow. I downloaded some free software off the internet to do it, my big gripe so far is I can't figure out how to check the progress of it while editing, it seems as though it's gotta be posted just to look at it, I'm probably missing something. Anyway... lots of fish pics to look at, most of them are on the blog somewhere. It can take a while to load, so be patient, and I'm not seeing a "turn off sound" button so my apologies to anyone who doesn't care for the music.

Aloha,

Steve

Hawaiian Angelfish....

The last post was sort of a lead in to this one. I went for a short Captain's dive on the charter during the surface interval yesterday (since Cathy's also a licensed Captain, it's legal, as a licensed Captain must remain on board at all times on charters) and managed to get my first decent shot of a Fisher's Angelfish (Centropyge fisheri). Hawaii has basically four angelfish that you might find while diving - Flame, Bandit, Potter's and Fisher's - and a couple of other species that can be seen by researchers in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. Our angelfish species are basically dwarf/pygmy species, although the Bandit (pictured a couple posts below) is a "large" angel species, and are typically shy and dart into the coral when you try to photograph them.

The Fisher's angel only grows to about two inches in length, typically lives in rubble below 60' or so and darts into the rubble on approach. It's probably something most divers won't see unless they're specifically looking for them... once you know where to look you can see tons of them at many dive sites. This is a fairly accurate color for most of the one's you can see, but sometimes there are individuals with brighter coloring, more blue, deeper reds and a brighter yellow on the tail. Anyway, I was happy to finally get this shot.

This pic was taking at Pawai Bay. It's a great spot in that it was one of the first refuges (no colleccting) here and there's lots of life. On yesterday's dives we were able to hear the whales - they've started to sing again - as an additional treat. We were just coming off a big overnight swell, but it was quite diveable yesterday. Water temperature is currently 75 degrees.... brrrr.

'Til next time,

Steve

Whoohoo!! I got to dive today....

... and my sinuses held up.

We had some crazy surf come up two nights ago. About 10PM it started pounding enough we could hear it fairly well from the house (we're two miles up the road from the coast, maybe at least a mile in a direct line), our friends at the bay said it shook their house. Yesterday was blown out, some of the dive companies went out, but I had nothing scheduled, I'm glad I didn't have to make the call. This morning things had settled down enough to get out of the harbor and make it to Pawai Bay, off the Old Airport Park, where the diving conditions were actually pretty OK from the boats.

I played Captain on the dives and was able to do a short dive in between dives once we reached the second mooring. Pat (my wife, who was onboard since it was a very light load today - only one customer) joined me for a few minutes on the dive.

Pat noticed a pair of Bandit Angels (Apolemichthys arcuatus) down at 70-80 feet. We went down to take photos. I'm rather proud of this one.... it's tough to explain to someone UNDERWATER that you want them in the photo, and they need to align themselves so they are behind a moving fish while you take a shot - especially when you've never tried it or talked to them about it before. I found out something new about the Canon, with the underwater housing, if you forget to use the flash diffuser, the flash works differently - lotsa backscatter if there's much particulate matter in the water (mostly cloned out in photoshop in this case) and sort of only lights up a band on the photo. In this case it worked out in that the band that was lit up went through the fish and my wife.

Anyway, conditions were actually pretty nice down in Pawai Bay today. Highlights of the dives were a manta ray, tons of raccoon butterflyfish, pyramid butterflyfish, a couple of free swimming octopus, the Bandit Angels, trumpet fish of various colors, and more.

Kona water temperature report. Things have cooled off since I last dove, prior to the sinus issues. I saw 75 today, down from 79 in early December.

Later,

Steve

Taking photos underwater can be a bit of a challenge...

I've been wanting to get a "good" shot of one of these guys for a long time. This isn't it quite yet. So many of the fish dart about so much that it's tough to get them focused. The closer you are the tougher it is, too far out then the flash doesn't get enough light to the subject.... this photo has just a bit too much movement for my tastes. One of these days!!!

This is a juvenile Yellowtail Coris Wrasse (Coris Gaimard). On occasion, people not familiar with the Hawaiin fish will mistake it for a clown fish (Hawaii doesn't have clown fish, I believe we've just a tad to cool of a water temperature for them to reproduce successfully). Typically we'll see the Yellowtail Coris in this coloration up to about 3 inches or so. As they grow, they will lose the white stripes, start adding blue and develop a yellow tail. If you take a look through all the archives, or click on the "wrasse" label below, you should find a shot or two of larger specimens.

Aloha,

Steve

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

Cruisin' with the turtles...

This one was straight from the camera into Brightcove. Pretty clear.

Canon G9 video underwater, in Kona Hawaii

Just playing around with the new camera. The video looks pretty darned good straight out of the camera. Youtube compresses it a great deal so it's not quite as nice. I did a dive this afternoon just for fun with the camera. I've got to learn the Canon menu, but a few things turned out fairly Ok and look as though when I go into photoshop I'll be able to get them looking the way I want.