Dave

Probably not well known . . . wetpixel started and moderated steve's UW forum...Phil Askey onced asked us to move the UW forum over to dpreview (was not a bad idea)...then eric set up the wetpixel forum. Steve has at times over the years echoed wetpixel news items providing a link back to the source. How many here found wetpixel first on steve's? Wetpixel has always had a good relationship with steve's. Steve linked to eric's palau trip and that is when I first knew of eric and soon after that got him to go to kona. I remember the hits would go way up when steve would link us, and the next day our server ISP would email us couselling us to upgrade our plan. So steve can be credited with some of the early success of wetpixel -- including eric getting involved. The rest is history. How did I find wetpixel? I can tell you this. It took several scaps of paper to come up with the name that would be descriptive but short enough for a decent domain name. I kind of regretted it a few weeks later when I dicovered there was already a site with a very similar name but the photos were completely different. I'm glad the name has stuck. I first thought of getting eric more involved when he said that he liked the name of the site -- something we agreed on. I really like what he's done with the place.

I had forgotten all about the coolboards. It never worked. Wetpixel was the news only, Then the "Wetpixel Commumity" really started with the steve's digicam's underwater digital forum I moderated. We can thank Steve for much support in the early early days. Many early underwater product press releases ran on Steve's with a wetpixel attribution. He was the original big linker and the refferal log is still full of his URL I'm sure. I first heard of Eric when Steve ran a link to his Palau Trip log. I wanted something similar for the Kona trip and contacted Eric to get him aboard. The rest is published history. I felt with my personal schedule and minimal time investment I was really holding this thing back. Eric and team have taken this much farther than I could ever have hoped to. Job well done! Keep up the fantastic work. David Breitigam

Actual attack photo!

Rob, Great stuff for a first timer. You are seeing a lot of light blues in your shots that is washing out the colors. Are you shooting in program mode? If so, you may wish to switch to manual next time (Manual aperture and shutter - Start at F6 @ 1/100 ISO 200) and let the strobe do it's TTL thing. The idea is to reduce the use of the ambient light and make the strobe work a little harder to bring out the colors. More details here: http://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?act=S...&f=1&t=1763&hl= -Dave

The 5050 is a great choice. Ask MCD to thow in the PT-015 housing for US$295 when they send you out that lens. Then there is strobes .... :-) Have fun with your new toys. -Dave

Stainless Steel WILL rust if not rinsed properly. Your problem seems to indicate that the housing was not rinsed enough after the last use and cystals formed in the crack. The last freshwater rinse on a trip I like to use new water (not previously used for another camera), and a toothbrush to get to salt crystals that may already be forming in the tight spots due to gear dry out. Always keep your gear as wet as possible until you get a really good rinse. From Monterey Bay Sea Otters Dive Club newsletter: "About the worst that can happen to your gear is (microscopic) salt crystals growing in and on it. With their sharp edges they act like sandpaper. The problem is that they start growing immediately when salt water starts evaporating, and they can even grow when water with a minimal salt content evaporates. So it is not enough to rinse your gear. The mantra is "soak and rinse"! If that is not possible soon after a dive, it is better to pack your gear in a plastic garbage bag to keep it as moist as possible until you can soak and rinse it." This applies to your camera gear too. You can't soak it too much. Dave

To prevent out-of-camera changes, good old fasioned seals might work. An official would verify your media is blank ( and of the correct regulation size for your camera resolution). Then place a contest seal on your USB (or other) port and your memory door. Upon return the seals would have to be untampered. Hmmm. Sounded OK at first but not sure folks would want the possibility of some adhesive left on their camera. Dave

OK here ... Looks like the same stuff. Dave

We used to get Fiber from "Todd's House of Fiber" www.toddsfiber.com but it has vanished. Last time I logged in I noticed he had sold out and was under a new name. However now the old URL is dead. Anybody know what happened to Todd's? I used 3mm (big thick stuff) but no doubt you can go smaller for more flexibility. If you go to this news archive (scroll to April 25, 2001 - prehistoric) you will see that Herb Ko was an early pioneer in this and actually used a 1mm fiber to prevent the pre-flash from firing a conventional slave. Maybe 1mm is too small then if you wish to reliably get low power flashes. Dave

The pure conservationist seems to say that the natural earth exists best with zero intrusion and intervention by humans. Policy based on these ideals invariably goes bad because it ignores humankind as major undismissible part of the eco equation. Locally in southern California in recent years we have lost hundreds of thousands (millions?) of acres to forest fires on National Forest recently converted to Wilderness Land. Even though the logging roads existed making fighting the fire possible, the roads were illegal to use, and in many areas the fire ran it's natural course unchecked (lightening strike). The human part of the equation (arguable of course) was drought. Yet we tied our own hands in an attempt to stay out of an equation from which we will probably NEVER escape. I believe we have to do our best to compensate for our poor contributions to the eco equation. Thiis means that our decisions concerning the enviroment can not be the purest, but compriomises that attempt to place value in the natural wonders due to their beauty (human observed) enjoyment (human experienced) and consumption (renewable sources). Sometimes a resource can be protected successfully for one use. Sometimes it takes all three. This is why we have national parks, this is why we still dive next to a two thousand year old live coral that we might accidently kick to pieces. It is the poor human record and our million mistakes coupled with commercial greed that polarizes opinion, with fisherman thinking way to short term and environmentalists thinking too pure (we can't hope to get it right so lets get our hands off). I've come to believe (I've only seen a shark once in the Carribean and from a great distance) that human mismanagement of sharks and fish populations have made sharks far scarcer than is natural (anecdotal experience of divers of 40 years ago) and that shark feeding for divers is a neccessary compromise to encourage humans to place a much wider value and perception on these creaters other than a food source that can sometimes be a human predator. Look. Very few in the scuba industry are driven by greed. Nobody is getting filthy rich (that I know of). You've really got to have a passion for this stuff to stay in it. Shark feeding is, in my opinion, far on the beneficial side to sharks and humans. Taking the purist approach to this issue will only make it worse for sharks and divers. My 2 cents. Dave

We stayed at Turneffe Island Lodge in '99. It is only a few hundred yards from "The Elbow" which is one of the best dive locations in Belize. Very happy with the Resort. Excellent Diving even though a big hirricane had been by in previous weeks. Was my first digital photography experience. Excellent Food (They publish a recipe book), and as a vegetarian I still had plenty to eat. Downside the week we were there was the wind blowing constantly and the sponges were spawning which made for some interesting pictures but reduced vis. (probably 70 ft max at the time). Dave

I think the 17 inch shipping is still delayed as of this weekend - so it will be hard to find someone with hands-on unless they attended MacWorld SF in January or got to an Apple store that has one. Read: Powerbook Central Dave

Hi, P(rogram) mode will be OK while you work on other skills. However, as you get more comfortable, to get best results you will want to shoot manually. In low light situations (in the reef shadow, night dives, late afternoon, low vis) program mode can get some pretty good results. However, on a well lit reef, the camera program will detect lots of sunlight and cut the flash exposure out almost entirely. At depth, sunlight light is too far to the blue spectrum, and your program exposures will be exposed properly, but all a blue mono-chrome. White balance settings will do little to correct this. On the Olympus Cameras, By shifting to Manual Mode, where you set the shutter and aperture manually, your flash will remain in a TTL-like exposure mode - the camera wil attempt to compensate the flash power to get a correct exposure on the subject. This allows you to set the aperture/shutter settings to get the desired ambient light exposure (those deep blue water backgrounds), stop motion, and depth of field while allowing the flash to autolight the subject (not fool proof like any "TTL" but gets some great consistent results). Since you are shooting with the on-board flash only, get as close as you can. Then get closer. At depth, Start out at F6, 1/100sec at ISO200. Look at the LCD image after each shot. Keep the histogram display on to give you a quick reading that you have not burned out the highlights (un-fixable photo damage), something you can not always detect with the LCD image. Change the f-stop up and down to compensate on exposure feedback. If conditions stay constant throughout your dive you will find yourself changing exposure settings seldom. The most important thing is to be safe and have fun. Take on the work-load of manual exposure after you are completely comfortable with the rest of your situation. Have fun -- Dave

A money-shot Eric. I've never seen anything like it. With that kind of verocity it's a wonder more of those little guys don't survive.

Lot's of great photos here! (wher've I been?). That one Eric took of me in Kona is actually with a DS-125 and a slaved DS-50 (even though I have a dual Ike sync cord installed). Obviously playing around. david@wetpixel.com