This is an editorial article titled You Are What You Eat plus an article titled An Encounter with the Mantis Shrimp, both of which I contributed to ultraMARINE magazine, a bi-monthly publication in the UK for aquarists.

The cover image on the left is mine too. It’s a true clownfish (Amphiprion percula) from Kimbe Bay in Papua New Guinea.

Right click here to download the PDF file (1.9 MB).

The PDF file is also available as a download from my iTunes podcast.

After having heard so much about him, I finally had a chance to meet Wetpixel’s video guru Drew Wong recently in Bangkok. And of course, I hounded him with questions about existing and upcoming HD cameras, but sadly, there wasn’t sufficient time to absorb enough, so I’ll have to find another occasion to harass him with queries.

Sometimes, even the most simple of tasks can become quite a challenge. Recently in Bangkok, a friend was having trouble opening a durian fruit, so I offered to lend a hand.

More friends were on hand to watch and record our herculean struggle on video. They were only using a small still camera, the Canon IXUS 850IS, so I didn’t really expect them to make it into a video.

…and no, this is not how I usually spend my time.

iPod version (37 MB)

Subscribe to my podcast via iTunes here.

Managed to get an ID on this goby from a friend. Turns out that the common name for this fish is a “blackfin coral goby” (Paragobiodon lacunicolus).

What a boring name. I don’t care, I’m still calling it a “panda goby”.

Before writing up my notes from my recent visit to the Lembeh Strait (assuming I ever have time to do so), I decided to try something new. Click below to watch a short story I put together about an encounter I had with a very hungry frogfish. It may take a while to download, depending on your net connection.

If you can’t view the file with your browser, you can always right-click and download to your desktop. The quality of the iPod version below the graphic is better if you’re going to download.

Or subscribe to my podcast via iTunes here to automatically get updated whenever I put one of these together. Enjoy!

iPod version (14.9 MB)

Just got back to an internet connection, and have just gone completely cross-eyed from weeding through several hundred emails (with several hundred more to go). It was another awesome trip to Lembeh with great photos of marine life, ranging from images of adorable little fish to pix of truly strange and gruesome critters.

With the backlog of work I have and the very limited time before I head out again, realistically it’ll take me a while to go through my images and notes to put something coherent together.

In the mean time, here’s a preview image of an irresistibly cute little goby. I haven’t had time to look for a proper ID yet, but for the time being, I’m referring to it as the “panda goby”, for obvious reasons.

More to come as soon as I can get my act together.

Back in the days when I had a respectable office job, I got bored a lot. (I’m sure this never happens to anyone else with respectable office jobs.) So I kept myself mentally occupied by thinking of new projects, sorting out lists of clients I needed to touch base with, and occasionally, just daydreaming (ok, more than just occasionally).

While wrapping up preparation for my trip to Lembeh, I made a bootable backup of my laptop hard drive. In the process of reviewing what’s on my hard drive, I came across the product of what must have been a particularly uneventful day at work many years ago, and/ or the product of boredom-driven delirium.

It’s not quite Shakespeare, but heck, Shakespeare wasn’t an underwater photographer…

Ode to the Sea Gods
Salt and sea, sand and rubble,
Bless my camera free from trouble.
Never a leak my housing to suffer,
Nor busted lens from which to recover.
Annual service I promise to get,
And charging of batteries not to forget.
Keep o-rings supple, lest strobes misfire,
And mis’rable ulcers I acquire.
Let not this fate befall me ever,
Good photos to take shall I endeavour.
Sand and rubble, salt and sea
Please keep my camera trouble free!

AARRGGHHHHH how I detest packing. Finding, sorting through, testing, wrapping, eliminating, replacing…every trip is different, so for every trip, it takes me a couple of days at least to figure out what I need to take.

To give you an idea of what’s accompanying me to Lembeh and Manado, here’s a list. By putting everything here, I’m forcing myself to double-check all the items once more, before I even attempt to put everything into carrying cases.

I’ve learned the hard way that this arduous self-imposed torture is necessary. Once, I showed up at a beautiful tropical island, all ready to go. As I assembled my gear, I realised at that I had forgotten to pack screws. That’s correct. Little 5-cent screws that held together all the other expensive gear. Without the screws…I was screwed.

So here goes:

• Three Canon 5D cameras
• Two Canon 100mm macro lenses
• Sigma 50mm macro lens
• Canon 15mm fisheye lens
• Canon 17-40mm zoom lens + custom-made zoom gear
• Canon S50 point and shoot
• +2 and +4 diopters
• Extension tubes
• Teleconverters
• Two Zillion 5D housings
• Four viewfinder adapters
• Housing arms/ grips
• Nexus port adapter
• Inon port adapter
• Nexus 60mm port
• Nexus extension rings
• Inon 100mm port
• Inon external macro diopter
• Inon extension rings
• Two Athena dome ports + custom extension tube
• Port remover tool (for when the ports get stuck)
• Four Inon Z220s strobes
• Four Inon strobe-to-arm adapters
• Four -0.5 diffusers
• Fibre-optic cables for strobes + spares
• Two sync cords for strobes
• Inon magnet adapters for Sync cord use
• Inon focus light controllers for fibre-optic use
• One ScubaCam prototype u/w torch + 2 batteries + charger
• One normal torch
• Six Ultralight ball joints
• 12 screws for ball joints
• Six DB-05 Ultralight short arms
• One DB-08 Ultralight medium arm (don’t know how I ended up with only one of these, must have left one somewhere)
• Four DB-12 Ultralight long arms
• Twelve AC-CS Ultralight clamps
• 32 AA rechargeable batteries
• Four AA rechargers
• Five Canon 5D batteries + 2 chargers
• Variety of plug-shape adapters
• Two Sandisk 8GB Extreme III CF cards
• One Sandisk 4GB Extreme III CF card
• Firewire CF card reader + backup PCMCIA slot CF reader
• O-ring grease (Inon, Zillion, Nexus, Sea & Sea, Generic)
• Screwdivers, coins, tape, scissors, o-ring removers, lens paper, USB memory stick, name cards, everything but the kitchen sink
• External hard disks (60GB, 160GB, 80GB iPod)
• Two firewire cables
• iPod cable
• One ageing, decrepit Mac Powerbook G4 (soon to be replaced with a MacBook Pro)

And I haven’t even started on my dive gear or clothes…

In the process of packing for my impending trip to Kasawari Lembeh Resort in the Lembeh Strait, I paid a visit to David at ScubaCam.

I’ve only gotten to know David relatively recently, but I love going to his shop, because he’s a real “tinkerer” and enjoys fiddling around with gear and think about ideas for new equipment as much as I do.

He’s one of the few people who doesn’t give me the “Are you nuts?!” look when I throw out whacky ideas. In fact, he actually likes some of the silly things I suggest. Go figure.

David’s been developing some new toys recently, and I’m going to have the pleasure of testing one of them on my trip.

In short, David’s taken a light casing made by Patima, and completely re-done the inside. The light is an array of LEDs, and produces a bright, consistent, white wide-beam with no central “hotspot” — i.e., even, white lighting.

Unlike HID lights, the light switches on-and-off in an instant, meaning no delays, and the entire kit is compact.

The prototype light also has a removeable lens on the front, which focuses and concentrates the light somewhat, creating a slightly narrower light beam.

The battery is a light-weight lithium polymer battery, and David’s designed everything so that even in the event of a flood, the light can be disassembled with a screwdriver, wiped off, dried out, battery replaced, and everything will work again.

David flooded one intentionally to test his theory (see, told you he’s crazy), and although the insides of the flooded light look a bit grungy, it works perfectly.

The light seems like it will be ideal for video, but I’ve got a few ideas I want to try with still images, if I can find the right circumstances.

Yeah, I know. Most normal people wouldn’t get turned on by the prospect of testing a compact, very bright, white-light, wide-beam, underwater light that turns on-and-off at an instant. But hey, what’s the fun in being normal?

Perspective is an editorial column I write regularly for FiNS Magazine. This installment is entitled “Crying Wolf”:

[more...]

Pasta simply cannot fathom why I get so preoccupied with my computer, when it’s obviously so much more fun to go chase cats and sniff light poles.

While on a business trip to Seattle a few years ago, I stayed with a friend, at another friend’s house. One afternoon, our friend drove us around for a tour of the town.

In a particularly scenic and quaint neighborhood, she parked her shiny, clean white VW beetle under a row of trees, and we went for a pleasant stroll. When we returned some time later, this is what we found — a no-longer-pure-white VW beetle.

Ignoring the fact that our host and chauffeur was practically in tears, we pulled out a camera (when we managed to stop rolling in laughter) to take this snapshot, then worked late into the night (despite suffering from jet lag and sleep deprivation) with our rudimentary photoshop skills and virtually non-existent German language vocabulary to produce this work of modern art for our kind, if unfortunate, host.

You have to wonder what the local fowl were eating to produce such a psychedelic array of colours.

Perhaps Seattle needs some practically minded people like the ones in Tokyo who post pigeon-poop warnings.

[And yes, I'm aware we got the word for "friend" incorrect, but it was about 3am local time, and who knows what hour in the time zone we were supposed to be in]