Autopsea

Nice post Mark !  I agree with everything, I spent over 3 years of my life sailing around and I can confirm all this for the boat-related stuff (at that time I didn't have a housing).

 

Contact with locals is probably the issue I miss most of the time. I tend to want to 'escape' from the human world, and even if I like getting in touch with small tribes and native in remote area, we always try to avoid areas with cities / hotel / crowded beach or crowded with other boats-bays.

 

You're probably right for you double-gear thing. It will not stop me to have everything in double if I can (at least as a back-up if anything flood/break) and potentially to try using both from time to time, when the dive condition fit; i.e. under the boat on shallow sandy area.

 

Your point with current is very important. I'll double it, and add that the water will be much clearer when the current come in.

sharks will be there anyway, just not facing the same direction : )

 

I'm starting to think we should -with other photogaphy organization/community- write down a "perfect competition rules" associated to a label.
Each organisation can then decide to follow these guidelines and get the label, so every photographer know it's safe to participate. Without following the guidelines, no label, less participant, less photos.

That would be awesome and I would definitivly help on such a project. If anyone has strong shoulders enough... and time !

Nice work : ) I guess you could get a better voice quality from the video ? it sounds "oldish", not sure it's on purpose ?

another comment that i've previously trying to make :
This '100 millions sharks are killed by man each years' comes from nowhere, and using it makes "you", but then "us" as sharks protectors, not trustable for politics that would eventually learn the truth.
They might think "Okay these guys are just overmaking it to make their point, I'm not listening to activists anymore".

I recommend you to read this, consider what is really said here, and remember when was it done and what have been done to protect sharks since, plus how many area are not usable anymore because there is no more sharks left :

Clarke S, McAllister MK, Milner-Gulland EJ, Kirkwood GP, Michielsens CGJ et al. (2006) Global estimates of shark catches using trade records from commercial markets. Ecology Letters 9:1115-1126

saying this very friendly : )

Thomas

Be very carefull when you are around Manta, drug dealers apparently use sharks fins/body to pass cocain around, and they do not like people to sniff around...

I think Cyan filters can be (can they?) good as well if you don't use red filters. (talking for photos here).
If I keep a daylight WB on my camera setting, shoot in raw let say a shark face close to me with coral garden behind, strobes ON.

With no Cyan filters, if I change the white balance on LR / PSCR on my computer then, the coral garden will be white balanced, but the shark face will become redish (purpleish/orangish actually).
with the cyan filters, because on the non-WB photo the face is even bluer (and that is where I'm not too sure : can it get bluer than blue????) when I change my WB on the computer, both the coral garden AND the shark will be OK.

Am I right? or will the Cyan filter not add anymore blue to the original blue?
Is there any way to go further in white balance options than the one proposed in LR/PS ? (further right in the purple and in the yellow for exemple).

Thanks !


Here is an example to illustrate the discussion :

White balanced in PSCR, no filters, strobe on :

Well, the thing is these surfers really thinks that the shark situation is artificially created by man.
They are ok surfing in water with natural sharks population, but they think because of the MPA and fish farm they have to surf in an "artificially created sharks playground" and they don't want that.

The other thing is, people say "when you kill a shark another comes". I'm not sure this is true for large sharks like tigers (and maybe bulls at a different scale). We've been seeing that populations of large sharks (or, to be exact, geographic clusters) can be extremly small (less than 100 individuals around islands way bigger than La Reunion). So killing a few adult IS a big deal for the geographic cluster. killing 50 may put the cluster at risk, dangerously reducing the genetic diversity and creating inbreeding for next generations, making the population to be even more fragile and lowering its adaptation capacities.