Kawika Chetron, a local diver in the San Francisco Bay Area, went missing off Cape Mendocino this weekend. Berkley White writes, ”he’s a great guy and a great shooter. He’s a very strong guy and we’re hoping he swam the 5 miles to shore and is hiking out of the Lost Coast as we speak. He dropped anchor on Saturday and has been missing since.”

If you have any information about Kawika, or just want to help, please contact Berkley at .

Wetpixel and DivePhotoGuide have teamed up with the 2007 SCUBA Show to announce the Under the Blue International Photo and Video Competition.

Limited to amateurs and hobbyists (no professionals), the competition features over $20,000 worth of prizes (with travel trips to Fiji, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, and Australia), and includes a category focused solely on California’s underwater environment.

The deadline for entries is May 12, 2007, and 15% of proceeds will be donated to marine conservation efforts. Winners will be announced online and exhibited at the show in Long Beach, California on June 2nd-3rd. For all the details and information on how to enter, continue to Under the Blue 2007 at UnderwaterCompetition.com…

Oceanblue Divers and the New York Underwater Photographic Society (NYUPS) have partnered to host ’Planning Your Shot‘ on March 22nd in New York. The event features seminars presented by Amos Nachoum, Jason Heller, and Larry Cohen on their techniques and insights into the photographs they take, and the opportunity to meet fellow underwater photographers just prior to the Beneath the Sea dive exposition.

The entry fee is only USD$12 for early registration, and includes appetizers, two raffle tickets for prizes, and discounted drinks. Reserve your spot quickly if you plan on attending, as space is limited.

For years now, the photo of the week contest at Wetpixel has been generating fantastic, themed imagery whose quality rivals some of the best published images out there.  Now you can embed the POTW into your own webpage! It’s as easy as copying a bit of HTML into your website’s code.

There are two versions of the embeddable POTW web widget. One always shows the last POTW winner—perfect for featuring beautiful underwater imagery on your own website—and the other is keyed to a specific user here at Wetpixel. The user-specific version will show only the last image entered into the POTW by that user.

The cut & paste code for embedding the photo of the week widget is available here.

National Geographic has published a 38-page article on the global fish crisis in the April 2007 issue of its magazine.  The article is written by Fen Montaigne, with topside photographs by Randy Olson and underwater photography by friend and Wetpixel member, Brian Skerry.

The Mediterranean may lose its wild bluefin tuna. High-tech harvesting and wasteful management have brought world fish stocks to dangerous lows. This story explores the fish crisis—as well as the hope for a new relationship between man and the sea...

Preview the article online at National Geographic’s website.

Effective immediately, Wetpixel’s Photo of the Week contest supports public voting, so send all your friends to vote for their favorite underwater image of the week! 

Public votes aren’t worth as much as votes from registered members, so be sure to log in before voting to make your voice heard the loudest.

The Dallas Underwater Photographic Society (DUPS) will be hosting Marty Snyderman for an all-day underwater photography seminar on April 15, 2007 in Dallas, TX.

The seminar is priced at USD$150, or USD$100 for DUPS member, and is designed by Snyderman ”to make sure that you know more about underwater photography at the end of the day than you did at the beginning...once you really “get it” you can take the concepts you learn with you anywhere you dive and create compelling images.”

Wetpixel member Mark Hoover (hoovermd) has written a review of his experiences of the UK-Germany housing for the Canon 5D. Relying only on the manufacturer’s reputation to make his purchase, and after using the housing for over a year, Mark says:

If I had to do it all over again I would go with a UK-Germany housing. The workmanship is very good and Uwe [Kiehl] has gone out of his way to provide customer service to me since he has no US distributor.

Continue reading for an in-depth look (with many photographs) at the UK-Germany 5D housing…

In late 2003, Steve Drogin suggested that I apply to give a seminar at the annual Boston Sea Rovers Clinic.  Being completely new to the industry, I had no idea who the Sea Rovers were nor what their clinic was all about.  A few months later, I arrived at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel in Boston to find the most amazing dive show I had ever seen.

Although the annual clinic has limited space for booths, its speaker line-up and Saturday evening film festival are typically the main draw for visitors…

Congratulations to the winners of the 2007 Underwater Images Photo/Video Competition, which have recently been announced online.  Among the winners were quite a few Wetpixel members, including Jose Alvarez (Best of show), Ralph “Larry” Oberlander, Keri Wilk, Matt Segal, Csaba Tokolyi, and more!  The Underwater Images contest is associated with Scubafest in Ohio, USA.

It looks like the same photographers have been winning all of the recent underwater photography contests.  If you have photos you think are better than the ones that have been winning, be sure to enter, next year. :)