I’m sitting in the airline lounge now, laptop computer out, hooked up to the net via wireless, compact digital camera in hand, card reader to transfer files to my laptop…all this whiz-bang gadgetry just to upload a photo of sushi (a fish photo of sorts).

Obviously, at this early hour, there’s no way I can stomach sushi. Coffee, a bagel, and some vegetable soup is more than enough.

I need to fly on Asia Asia from Bangkok to Sabah. According to the Bangkok office of Air Asia, I’m only allowed 15kg total check-in and have to pay about US$5/ kg for excess. Air Asia HQ in Malaysia, however, allows an extra 15kg on top of the normal 15kg as a sports equipment allowance, for a small fee.

Air Asia Thailand refuses to give this sports equipment allowance, despite the fact that Air Asia HQ specifically said Air Asia Thailand should. I’m still trying to work out who’s actually calling the shots at Air Asia. Apparently they are too.

You know what? I hate budget airlines.

It’s not so much that the airline’s Thailand office wants to charge excess that bothers me. I understand that. It’s the fact that my baggage allowance is either 15kg or 30kg, depending on the mood of the person taking the booking, and the fact that Air Asia in Thailand appears to be making up the rules as it goes along instead of following corporate policy.

Given the apparent lack of management coordination at Air Asia, I’m going bare bones with my equipment. No scuba gear (all borrowed on site), and about 25kg of camera gear (which translates into being able to take only one camera underwater and having to travel with no back-up gear, something I haven’t done in years).

Note to self: Avoid Air Asia.

The first is a bottle of Chateau de Bordes Jacques Morel 1967 vintage Armagnac, a present from Stéphane, whom I met recently in Papua New Guinea.

Stéphane had quite a few problems with his camera that I was able to help get resolved (with the help of ScubaCam and Ai Lin, who was also on the trip) before we headed out to sea on the Golden Dawn. Otherwise, he would’ve been on an extended liveaboard trip without the use of his camera, which would have been a complete bummer.

I have to admit that I’ve never had Armagnac, and I had to search the net to learn more. It’s the a gorgeous, oak-red colour (bottle on the right), and I’m saving it for the right occasion.

Then just last night, a good friend in Japan who owns the underwater camera shop Aquaforum gave me a bottle of 2003 vintage Bordeaux, Chateau Destieux, Saint-Emilion Grand Cru. Of course, I’m saving this for the right occasion too.

I certainly don’t drink a lot these days, but when I do, I only like the good stuff!

Incidentally, taking this photo of the bottles was a fun exercise in experimenting with light too. I wanted a dramatic look, but I don’t have the requisite lights, backdrop and studio to shoot a proper product shot.

So I did a bit of improvising. I chose the back of a black leather seat as a backdrop, to create a moody, non-distracting background. I set the bottles on the dark wood floor near the seat. Using a Gorillapod as a tripod, I set my Canon 5D to a 5 second exposure, f11, ISO100, which pretty much eliminated most of the influence from ambient light, since I shot this at night.

After triggering the camera shutter, I held two Sony W300 compact cameras (one in each hand), and half-depressed the shutter buttons to set off the focus-assist lights. I used the warm, soft light to “paint” in light, being careful to hold the compact cameras at a sharp angle to avoid creating too much glare. Finally, I triggered one camera’s flash at a sharp angle to fill in a little bit of light in the background and lift the bottles slightly up and away from the black.

The process sounds more difficult than it actually was. The final image isn’t catalogue-quality, but it’s good enough to create the mood I wanted to achieve in order to show off these very special bottles.

One thing I’ve been playing with recently is software to produce photographs that show a high dynamic range. Without going into too much detail, this basically means that your photograph displays a wider range of light values than normally possible.

This is accomplished by “combining” images taken at different exposure values, so you get detail in every part of the image, from the darkest to the brightest areas. This is really useful for times when there’s harsh light and shadows, and your camera would have a difficult time capturing the entire range of light values in one frame.

Here’s an example using Pasta as a model. The image on the left is an unadjusted, normally exposed image. The image on the right is an image created by running three images (bracketed at +1, 0, -1) through Photomatix software, using the tone mapping function.

The software allows me to create an image that more closely resembles what my eye saw. Our eyes are capable of seeing a much wider range of light than our CCDs are capable of capturing.

The obvious weak point is that the entire scene needs to be motionless in order to take and combine a number of images, so it’s not suitable for action photography. I don’t think I can use this underwater, but it’s fun to play around with it anyway.

You can download the software from the Photomatix site for free to try, but the resulting images will have a Photomatix watermark applied until you purchase a registered copy.

A larger version of the dynamic range adjusted photo of Pasta is here.

Because I update this blog regularly, I’ve redesigned my website as a portfolio. For a start, I’ve put together five galleries, comprising recent photographs of humpback whales, marine organisms with their mouths open, reef scenes, fish and miscellaneous critters.

I had a few more in mind, but just putting these initial galleries together was quite a chore, with image sorting and editing squeezed in late at night after attending to everything else going on in my life. As a result, I’ve gone to bed cross-eyed and dizzy every night (actually, morning) for the past couple of weeks.

I did my best to keep the file sizes down, but I suspect that if your net connection isn’t very good, it might take a while to view the galleries.

Once I recover, I’ll work on additional galleries and updating the ones I’ve already put up. For now, I’m looking forward to getting a full night’s sleep for a change!

My natural tendency to get distracted with new projects, ideas or interesting stories in the news hasn’t helped much either, as I often find myself several hours into researching a stray thought that crosses my mind in the midst of working on something else, which quite often was a tangent from yet another stream of consciousness.

As a result, I’ve spent much of my time at the computer or rushing to meetings, though I’ve managed to find time to hit the gym or go out for a run. In addition, Pasta reminds me twice a day, once early in the morning and once as evening approaches, that she needs to take me for a walk, so at least I’ve got built-in breaks.

Pasta also keeps me company when I work into the wee hours of the night, making sure I don’t get lonely (actually, she’s keeping tabs on me in case I get up for a late night snack).

In the midst of all this, I’ve coined a new term…Project Vertigo…to refer to times such as this when I’m juggling so many projects, thoughts, tasks and new ideas simultaneously that I literally feel queasy. On balance, I suppose it’s a good thing. Life is definitely interesting and my days are most certainly far from uneventful.

It’s the Golden Week holiday now in Japan, which is one of the few times during the year during which office workers can take vacation without fear of being ostracised, abused or otherwise sanctioned by their bosses and co-workers.

Japan, like many Asian countries, still has a masochistic office culture in which people pride themselves on never taking vacation, and where conversely, they abuse people who do. Circumstances have improved in the couple of decades that I’ve been coming here, but at its core, it hasn’t changed much.

Individually, most people admit it’s silly and largely pointless, particularly since much of the mandatory office attendance is devoted to face-time as opposed to any productive work. But collectively, it’s just the way things are. Everything in Japan is slow to change. This is no exception.

Anyway, the number of people travelling overseas for the holiday dropped significantly this year, something on the order of 20% or more. It’s a reflection no doubt of rapidly deteriorating economic circumstances, or perhaps more accurately, a continuation of the 20-year economic funk that Japan has been in, thanks to rampant corruption and a culture of accepting whatever the government does. Scandal after scandal, corruption case after corruption case, bumbling mistake after bumbling mistake…and still no change in government. Sigh.

The weather was brilliant this morning, so I took Pasta for an extended sit-in-the-sun session. Balmy weather + spring showers means dandelions have sprouted all over the place.

I remember as a kid finding hours of amusement blowing dandelion seeds around. Today in the park, all the kids had PSPs, gameboys and the like, showing no interest whatsoever in the yellow flowers or their feathery seed puffs, so it was up to Pasta and me be old fashioned and enjoy the dandelions.

Besides picking the optimal location, the challenge photographically was to light the subject in a way to maximise visual impact. In this case, the key was to set the EV (exposure value) to be slightly underexposed, and to use a main light (not diffused, targeted) off to the left, slightly below and behind me to emphasise the line of the fish’s face. Aiming the light at an angle to avoid lighting the background reef was critical. If I had lit the reef behind the fish, there would have been a lot of clutter, which would detract from the main subject.

I used a fill light, diffused, set about 1.5 stops lower than the key light, above and slightly to the left-of-center to provide overall fill, again aiming the strobe to avoid bringing out the background.

Photo data: EOS 5D, f7.1, 1/125, ISO160, 17-40mm zoom lens, Z-220s x 2.

I checked to see if FTP was working. It was. I checked to see if email was working. It was. I looked through the folders and data via FTP and couldn’t see anything obviously wrong. I read reams and reams of explanations on my host’s support Wiki. In the end, I could find nothing to give me a clue, so I used the “Contact Support” function provided by my domain host and went to sleep, thinking that at the very least, someone would respond and point me in the right direction.

How silly of me.

Upon waking, there was no reply, not even a hint of the remote possibility of a reply. So, I sent another very polite request for help to understand the problem, and then scoured the web for possible clues.

Having no background or training in any form of coding whatsoever made this task a bit of a challenge. You know how instruction manuals are notoriously unclear and poorly written? Try reading technical help sites or support Wikis. Gibberish. Gobbledygook. And in many cases long-winded and grammatically incorrect to boot.

Pasta wanted to take a walk, so I went out for an hour to clear my head, and when I returned to renew the frustrating search for an answer, I happened upon another person who had the exact same problem as I did, just a few hours before I did, with the same host I’m using.

Fortunately, he had figured out a solution just hours earlier, and I read through his brief explanation, dug around a bit more, and finally hit upon the solution.

So, my site is back up, I’m somewhat less stressed (though in a pisser of a bad mood), and I can get back to doing more productive things. I still don’t fully understand why my blog, which has been operating just fine for nearly two years, went down without my making any changes to it (same thing happened to the other guy).

But there are no coincidences in life, and I assume that the lack of response from my domain host coupled with the similar experience by someone else means it was something done by the host.

In case anyone else has a similar problem, the host is Dreamhost, and the problem is with wordpress installations using the WP-Cache plugin, which, for whatever mysterious reason, suddenly caused a major problem which resulted in an error message coming up, instead of my blog.

If you have a wordpress blog and suddenly see this:

then go to your wp-config.php file and delete the line: define(’WP_CACHE’, true);

This cures the problem.

Coincidentally, it’s just about time to renew my hosting package. Hmmm, I how I’ll respond when the request for payment comes?

[See post to watch Flash video]

I’ve uploaded a version to my iTunes podcast, or you can right click here to download a higher quality quicktime movie (59.9 MB) if the mood strikes you.