The Los Angeles Underwater Photographic Society (LAUPS) has announced a call for entries for their 2006 Photo Competition.  New for this year, the LAUPS is *not* accepting slide entries—another sign of the mass migration from film to digital.  The deadline for submitting an entry is September 22, 2006.  In an unusual move for a dive/photo organization (modern web practices? what?), LAUPS is also offering an RSS feed for updates, so you can be informed as soon as they post news or results on their home page.

Adobe Labs has finally released a public beta of Lightroom for Windows (it has been beta for Mac for a long time now).  From Adobe’s website: Project: Lightroom™ is Adobe’s effort to engage the professional photography community in a new way, giving you the opportunity to kick the tires and shape the feature set of a new tool being created just for you.

I’m going to download it now and give it a try.  I’ve been hearing good things about it…

Our friends over at FiNS Magazine are giving away three free trips to Papua New Guinea!  All you have to do to enter the drawing is fill out a short questionnaire by July 31, 2006.  Trust me: trading 5 minutes of your time for a chance to go to PNG is definitely worth it!

Tim Simond’s new coffee table book, Dive in Style, includes coverage of 26 different dive destinations spanning the globe.  For each destination, Tim features a single luxury or “stylish” resort and dive center, plus underwater photographs and descriptions of local diving. With only 2-4 pages dedicated to each destination’s local diving, the book isn’t meant to be a thorough guide to destination diving. Rather, it is a nice overview of luxury resorts and diving at specific destinations around the world. 

Microsoft has announced the winners of its Future Pro Photographer photo contest.  Yeang Ch’ng, a Wetpixel member, has won first place in the Nature & Landscape category with a beautiful image titled, “Cnidarian in the Clouds”.  Congratulations, Yeang!

Yeang is a MD-PhD student doing a PhD in Neuroscience at Harvard University, and has been shooting underwater for about three years with a Canon 10D digital SLR.  Yeang won some really nice booty for his 1st place win.  Continue reading for more information about Yeang’s winning image.

Ikelite has recently announced the new DS51 to replace their popular DS50:

The Ikelite DS51 Substrobe replaces the DS50, which has been a favorite of underwater photographers the world over. In addition to incorporating all the same great features of the DS50, the DS51 provides a Manual Exposure Mode with six (6) manual power settings in one-half f-stop increments for precise illumination of subjects underwater.

In addition, their DS125 now comes with a NIMH battery pack, yielding an extra 100 full power flashes per charge. That’s excellent news!

The deadline to the 2006 San Diego Undersea Film Exhibition is approaching. Films must be submited before August 15th. Each film must be no more than 5 minutes long, with at least 50% of the footage taken underwater. The exhibition is scheduled for Friday and Saturday evenings, October 20 & 21, 2006 at the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park. Here is your chance to see your work in a large-format, state-of-the art, digital theater, and to share your adventures with others. Please visit the SDUFEX website to sign up and get more information.

It is quite possible that I have spent more time under the water with this housing than anybody in any other ocean! I was one of the first in Australia to receive my HDV housing back in 2005. Since then I have filmed subjects from tiny Nudibranchs right up to massive Manta Rays and Whale Sharks for professional documentary TV crews including the BBC and National Geographic. Even though the housing is a ‘lump’ on land, once in the water it is well balanced and easy to use. The housing (like most new products) had a few annoying problems (such as slight vignetting), however I am happy to report that Amphibico listened to their customers concerns and applied themselves to come up with solutions. The result of this committment is a wonderful underwater housing.

Click here for the full review.

A new research project has just commenced in Papua New Guinea that is investigating seahorse diversity and distribution throughout the waters of PNG. This project is specially examining the species of seahorses that are found in PNG waters as there has been no research conducted on the species diversity and their distribution.

The project is being conducted by the Motupore Island Research Centre (MIRC) and they are now seeking assistance from scuba divers. MIRC is seeking assistance from divers that have visited Papua New Guinea in the past or plan to in the near future. MIRC requests any sighting information of seahorses and in particular any photos that divers have taken of seahorses in Papua New Guinea waters. If you have any information or photos that can be used please contact .

If you want further information, click here to download a PDF article about it.

Issue 31 of Underwater Photography Magazine (UWP) has just been published. As usual there is plenty of input from Wetpixel members, including a review of the Sea & Sea D200 by JP Trenque (frogmansub), a review of the Olympus E330 in 10 Bar housing by Jeff Mullins (reefwalker) and article on “Getting the blues” by me (Alex_Mustard), a final frame article by Tim Priest (Tim_Priest) and a report on the recent UWP Red Sea Workshop with images from Ralph Mortimore (Ralphy), Paul Carre (PRC), Timo Ahomaki (timoma) and Anders Petersen (apete). UWP Magazine is a free PDF magazine, published every two months.