alvinjamur

I've not dove for over two years and have not used the rig in all that time. Its sitting and doing nothing. Used the Subal CD3 on a total of 12 dives (all on Bonaire). Here's what's for sale : Subal CD3 (Only 12 Dives) Various Ports for the Subal CD3 Extension Tubes Pair of Ikelite DS125 + sync cords + 2 extra batteries Various ULCS arms Underwater Handheld Light Pelican Case to hold all of this U put in a camera and you are ready to shoot! A new CD3 alone will cost $4770.28 and am willing to part with the entire setup (as seen on pix below) for $6750 + Shipping/Handling. I can only accept checks. Will also throw in a Analox Nitrox Mix analyzer. Please email me at al_v AT mindspring.com - aLV

OK! At the risk of being labelled "impropritious", I will tell u. Imagine meeting a lady and treating her so, and then within the first 15 minutes of meting being told that, "Men are no good. Don't pee all over the toilet seat." OR being an English gent and then being told, "Britain is so small but there are too many of you everywhere." OR telling the chef, "Is that what you call lunch?" and completely ignoring what was transpiring on the dive platform.... ....just PLAIN NEGATIVITY, HIGH MAINTENANCE, ALL THE WHILE IGNORING THINGS THAT WERE SAID ON THE SAFETY BRIEFING!! Its just an utter and plain lack of tact and propriety towards people that you don't know. Never a good thing on any boat with a few people. As you can imagine people that perpetrate this feel an alienation. Regardless, it never hurts to be civil but I think its beyond some people. I can tell u that Jim and his staff were absolutely fantastic and had to work overtime on that last trip because there were certain divers that most definitely posed a safety hazard. Its one thing to go dive on a luxury liveaboard, looking at corals and taking pictures of damselfish and another to be diving with Tiger Sharks, Bull Sharks, Lemon Sharks and with bait. The latter needs presence of mind; a lack of it will most likely cause accidents. - aLV

I was one of the passengers on the trip when Diana went. I and the other passenger saw first hand on what transpired. Here's my reply to each and every point Diana raises. >Beware all you LIVEABOARD TRAVELERS: This boat is 65 ft. long and there were 14 people >on it. The cabins were so small that my friend and I had to take turns going in the room. >There was one camera area with one table which would seat one person only if they had >their camera gear spread out.... The size of the boat are fully spelt out on the site. The two dining tables are used as camera tables and its plain dimensional/spatial sense to realize that they can seat more than one person at a time. Anyone that thinks otherwise is either spatially challenged or is high on something. >On Monday, our first day out, I had to go wake up Jim A. at 4:30 p.m. to ask him when we >could dive. We anxiously waited all day. We then dove 1 time. Now I usually dive 5 times a day, >but on this week trip, I only dove 8 dives. Sometimes, I would wait and wait to dive, then go >lie down, ask Jim to awaken me when we were going to dive, and he would forget and I would >miss the dive. We were not offered more than two dives a day. I was afraid to ask Jim about >how we were supposed to know when to dive, as he would get angry at just about anything >and I was afraid of him. This statement is a blatant manufactured LIE!!! The crossing was especially rough with 10-12 foot seas. Given that Jim did not know the diving skills of people on the boat, it was a safety issue to be diving in seas that were rough and also filled with big Sharks. On this particular trip it was apparent to me that several of the safety briefing instructions that were given by Jim were blatantly and blissfully ignored. Several people on this particular (including Diana) needed more help than others as they consistently and persistently ignored the safety briefings. Jim, myself and others on the boat were indeed annoyed at Diana because of her rather vexatious attitude towards people on the boat. The pronounced negative attitude was strewn about on the other passengers as well as the staff of the Shearwater. All it takes is one person with negativity to bring down the camraderie of a whole boat and its all the more easier to do it on a small boat such as the Shearwater. I would rather not repeat here what Diana asked every male member not to do on the boat the first evening. Her query was rather insulting, demeaning and exhibited a total lack of tact towards strangers. Its NOT the number of dives you do for capturing images but the quality of the dives and water conditions that yield good pictures!! There were people on the boat that did 3-4 dives a day so saying that there were not enough dives is just mendacity at its best. >We were promised that our equipment would be hosed down when we arrived in Palm Beach, but >that never happened. We had run out of enough water.....I asked for two hangers to hang up some >wet things, but there were none extra. We were constantly moving our camera equipment out of >people's way on the floor..Way too crowded.... On the last day of the trip the boat had 300G of water. There were enough hangers out front to hang our stuff. When you have a small boat and you have a lot of camera gear its very obvious that people leave their stuff around. That's the way the pigeonhole principle works!! >Very Bad Experience. I could add much more, but this is sufficient for now. VERY GOOD EXPERIENCE! If people want to have hot towels after a dive, they should be looking elsewhere. Rest assured, the core experience will not be the same as diving on Jim's boat. This was my third trip on the Shearwater and I will go again. THE ABOVE IS MY UNEQUIVOCAL, CONSIDERED, TRUTHFUL OBSERVATION and I'm sure many on these forums that have been on the Shearwater will agree with. - aLV

Oooooh....GEAR LUST! I had a Leica M6....brings me back very very good memories. If they were good enough for Henri Cartier Bresson (my book : the greatest photographer regardless of genre!) then it's good enough for me.... I played with a friends' Leica M8 for a day. - aLV

Thanx for the inspiration, guys! I must point out that many people here that claim that you can only make good "HUGE" prints with a 39 megapixel camera are TOTALLY WRONG. They need to go back and re-learn and re-hash the basics of resolution, PPI, uprezzing, smoothing, human visual acuity, line pairs theory and interpolation. How the hell did the human race manage to have billboards at Times Square before digital!? And all this before the advent of the very egotistical 39 Megapixel backs?? Inherent in this whole "blowing up images" is the concept of viewing distance that most people miss. Better gear will NEVER make anyone a better photographer - I've seen enough wannabe phototypes that have long (400 - 600mm) lenses trying to shoot them at 1/125th of a second! Really, let's think before we make "big images" - why does the blue channel and noise have such a strong tryst?? why might it make more sense (from a signal processing purist point) to de-noise before using a multi-pass sharpening workflow?? I don't consider myself an "underwater photographer", however I am confident enough to talk pure tech photo stuff, be it underwater or over land. Fact is that light ultimately behaves as defined by Maxwell's equations, be it on land or under water. Bottom line : no amount of gear will ever replace the "photographic eye" or talent. What make this whole underwater stuff challenging is the absence of the want to develop grass roots skills and a predominant propensity (I've been guilty of it, too!!) to worry about gear, megapixels and the like. But...I guess it all fits in here because this place is called "Gear Lust".... - aLV

I re-read this thread in the beginning and have this to say : - with respect to hasselblad, new releases of computer software has tended to upgrade the firmware on the back. - with respect to noise handling, newer generation cmos devices have better tolerances than the older ones. for instance, if you take the same picture with (decent shadow detail in it) using a hasselblad cfh39 back and the new h3d2 back (2 years of separation) you will notice that the shadow thresholds within flexcolor have come down significantly to get comparable images. and this is a controlled test i've done using the same version of the software! cfh39 back needed 180, dark limit of 20, 1 as opposed to the new back back that needed 180, dark limit of 12, 1 ....u can read test results soon. will tell u where it'll be. FRANKLY, what surprises me more is why many u/w types do not use Prophoto as their default color-tag to process their raw images. - aLV

This whole medium format under-water thingmajig is certainly interesting. I've owned the earlier cfh39 hassy back alongwith the h2d camera and I've now upgraded to and still testing out the Hasselblad H3d2 (on land) and here's my 2c worth of personal experience/opinions with the hassy setup i have : - back currently goes up to iso 400 (after release of phocus, which i hope to get before its released to the public, back will goto iso 800). in the polar regions (last week) i was not able to get to my preferred fstop between f8-f11 with a 300mm lens as i needed to have a shutter speed of 1/600. - i use the back with an alpa 12swa and alpa 12tc but asked around to see if i could potentially weather proof at last the h3d body etc., answer was in negative - i won't even think of taking this rig worth about $30,000 (list) under the water as i've much to learn about underwater photography and "real" diving. even if i knew "how to dive really well", its going to be a pain in the a** to rig up a housing for the system. there's so many calculations etc to be done for dome port curvature etc., i'd rather stick to further developing my own diving skills and underwater photo technique rather than mess with the whole medium format thing. - i had a private meeting with the tech director and president of hasselblad in ny. the techies basically showed me mtf charts and related them to the extreme tolerances between the sensor and the first plane of lens glass. microns make the differences in focus points! given the exactness of this i would think it would be prohibitively expensive to rig up dome ports and the like. - unless i was a top-of-the-world underwater photographer earning several hundreds of thousands of dollars i would think trying to take a medium format system into the water would be a complete waste of course, people can do whatever "stokes" them. que..sera...sera. - aLV my website : www.alvinjamur.com

The 2006 Wetpixel Bahamas trip with Jim Abernethy was the best trip ever for me. It is unlike any other trip because you are with these really BIG animals. I was pretty nervous and hope to get better images this coming year. I'm about 8 trips behind in the sorts but an image of a lemon shark from the Bahamas trip stands out. I've blown this one up and its tack sharp....also got to meet the Wetpixel triumvariate in one place at the same time....

I wore official title of "Live Bait". This was my first time being in the open ocean with these huge things. I'm going back next year so I can get some real decent pix. I think I have a few decent ones this time around but got stuck on some other foto projects back in NY. Will post a few in a few weeks. It was an absolutely fantastic trip!! JASA is DA BOMB!

I've this crazy itch to go diving. Anyone here going to Bonaire. I'm looking for a dive buddy between Jan 23rd - Jan 31st. - aLV

Feb 2005, I lost my original Titan D100 and it was replaced by DEP with a brand spanking new one. I have dove with the new Titan D100 housing a total of 11 dives in Truk. I would now like to get rid of it as I've moved on from the D100 to the D2X and ended up getting a Subal housing for it. Here are the things I have for Sale (as a package, prefereably) - Light & Motion Titan D100 Housing (11 Dives Old) - Light and Motion Adapter Ring for Subal Ports (BRAND NEW) - Gear Set for 12-24mm - Gear Set for 105mm (BRAND NEW) - Gear Set for 60mm (BRAND NEW) - Titan D100 Field Service Kit (BRAND NEW) They are all in absolutely impeccable conditon. I would like to sell the entire setup for $3000 If you are interested please write me email at al_v@mindspring.com Thank You! - aLV

Alex, Fantastic pictures. Your and Eric's work are an inspiration for u/w photography. You wrote above that you shot the pictures in Adobe RGB Mode III, Auto Contrast, Auto Sharpening with no processing of the JPGs the camera threw out. Are the posts themselves still in Adobe RGB or are they converted to sRGB for the posts here? I love the deep saturated look, too. If Jay Maisel and Seth Reznick have that love I don't think I, a rookie, can be misguided. I only shoot RAW and assign a Prophoto colorspace when I bring 'em into Photoshop. I've still not played with any d2x raw images as I just don't have the patience for Capture to do its thing. Fantastic Images! -aLV

I used a pair of 90DX autos with a L&M housing on the D100. I used 'em at 1/4 power with diffusers on and the shots turned out fine. As for "How far can light go?" -- you just can't play with Physics. Best thing to do is to use the "Jim Church Handshake" routine and create your own table of stops and distances at full power. Or better....create a wheel u can use : http://www.daveread.com/uw-photo/exposure1...obe_manual.html - aLV

Here's what Nikon will do : 1) Announce a D200 with all the specs. Not give any sort of date on it. 2) Announce that the d2X will be out sometime soon and not on Feb 25th as announced. I really hope, for Nikons sake (and all of us invested in Nikon!) that the D2X kicks A**. - aLV :roll:

I've shot Nikons (f90x, f5, f100, d100) for the last 9 years and have a large collection of glass to go with it. I just got into uw photography and currently own an L&M housing for the D100 with a lot of different ports. I was seduced by the quality of the 1Ds last year and got one and then a whole lot of glass (I'm a gadget junkie!). Recently I took delivery of the 1DsM2 and am blown away by its quality. I'm contemplating on getting a housing for the 1Ds/1DsM2 and was wondering what people here thought of Seacam housing .vs. Subal housing for the 1Ds/1DsM2? Is there a way for me to reuse some of the L&M ports with either of these (subal/seacam) housings? Has anyone here heard any plans/rumors about L&M making a housing for the 1Ds/1DsM2 - if they do then I'd just have to get the housing and the gear set that'd go with the Canon glass. - aLV