Congratulations to Wetpixel's Eric Cheng for his cover shot on this month's Tauchen Magazine, and for his cover shot and cover story in Issue #5 of Shark Diver Magazine! Eric's story is entitled, "Galapagos Adventure," and features whale sharks, schooling hammerheads, and more.

Both of these covers were shot digitally, with a Sea & Sea-housed Canon D60 Digital SLR.

New Review: Aquatica's Jean Bruneau gives his first impressions of the Nikon 10.5" fisheye lens (with Nikon D100 and Aquatica D100 housing).

Aquatica has sent us some photos of their Canon Digital Rebel housings being assembled.  We're all looking forward to this new housing, which we've been told supports TTL.

*UPDATE FEB 19* New photos of painted housings!
[discuss in forums]

Aquatica's Jean Bruneau gives his first impressions of the Nikon 10.5" fisheye lens (with Nikon D100 and Aquatica D100 housing). *UPDATE* - March 15, 2004 - Photos from under the ice, by Jean Bruneau.

We would like to spread the word about a public call to photographers for helping to protect the biggest fish on earth. In Jan 2004 sharktrust.org lined up together with Project-A.W.A.R.E to start tracing the migration routes of whale sharks. These routes maintain yet unknown and are essential for enforcing the protection of this lovely species.

If you have photos of a whale shark, you can help! All you have to do is to send a copy to sharktrust.org or Project-A.W.A.R.E, and quote the place and date you took the picture.

Scientist are going to match the dot pattern with other photos from their database to identify the shark.  The dot pattern o­n the whale shark is unique as a human fingerprint The more submissions are forwarded to scientists, the more precise the estimation of the migration routes is going to be.

There are many new products being announced at this year's PMA Show in Las Vegas, including a new set of 8MP consumer cameras (which all use Sony's 8MP CCD), digital media card improvements (e.g. 8GB CF cards, 2GB memory stick pro cards, speed improvements), the first consumer camera to use a Foveon chip, and much more.

Instead of locally reproducing all of the press releases, I'd like to point you to Phil Askey's excellent product coverage of the show at his site, dpreview.com.

There is a lot of discussion going on in our forums about all of the new products. Please join us!

Kodak's PMA Announcement: Next-Generation Camera Offers Medium-Format Image Quality, 35mm Flexibility

The latest addition to Kodak’s venerable professional camera portfolio, the DCS Pro SLR/n digital camera contains a new high performance imaging system with an entirely new 35 mm size CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) sensor, which delivers 14 million pixels with a total available ISO range of 160 to 1600.

This looks like it is shaping up to be an excellent camera for underwater photographers with Nikon lenses. Want to see what others think? There is an active thread in our forums.

The prestigious Celebrate the Sea Marine Imagery Festival 2004 just got bigger. We thought competitions, seminars, photographic workshops, static exhibitions, non-stop marine feature documentaries, the latest dive equipment, digital innovations and some of the world's leading underwater image makers was just not enough. So now, the four-day festival will run alongside ‘ WETEXPO. 2004'

For the event we have perhaps assembled an elite VIPS – Speakers and Jury team. Confirmed to attend are: Wyland, Emory Kristof,  Dr Gerry Allen, Dr Walter Stark, Dr Mark Erhmann, Tony White, Michael AW, Kim Michelle Toft, Pierre Coton, Daniel Mercier, James Wiseman, Eric Cheng, Daniel Dorville, Mathieu Meur, Charles Hood, Phil Greco and John Bennett... (read more for full details)

Update: According to Olympus's PMA announcement, the Pro88 actually IS the new Olympus 8080! A website not affiliated with Olympus has just released some photos of the new Oly 8 megapixel 8080 as well as the camera that looks like the E20 replacement apparently called the Pro88. I'm sure we'll hear more once the official Olympus PMA announcement comes out later this week.

Craig Jones, one of our fearless co-admins, has finished migrating all of the features over from the old Wetpixel design. They are likely to still be rather buggy (e.g. links leading back into old sections of Wetpixel will probably not work), but we'll fix them as soon as possible. If you find broken links, please let us know.

Let's all give Craig -- and the rest of the Wetpixel staff -- our thanks. I am certainly very grateful for all the volunteer help we've been receiving here!