DIVE magazine’s October issue is now available to download. Featured in this issue is Douglas David Seifert’s tribute to the late Ron Taylor, Tobias Friedrich discusses shooting wrecks in black and white, Markus Roth records his experiences with the sailfish of Isla Mujeres and Steve Jones explores the Solomon Islands.John Boyle interview Doug Allan and the magazine showcases underwater images from the 2012 Veolia Environnment Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

DIVE digital editions are available in a wide variety of formats as free downloads after a mandatory registration.

Continue Reading

Gates Underwater Products has released images and updated specifications of their housing for the Canon EOS C300 and C500 digital cinema camera. Features include support for a wide range of Canon and PL mount lenses, the precision ports system, mechanical controls and the Gates Seal Check is included as standard. The Convergent Designs Gemini RAW recorder can be incorporated into the housing to give true 4K RAW recording, and Gates’s EM43 monitor can also be used if required.

The Gates C300/C500 housing is shipping now.

Continue Reading

Thom Hogan writes in his Nikon blog, byThom, about the future of the DX sensor format. He has designated October to be “DX month” on his blog and will explore the options and trends for DX camera development. Given that DX format cameras are still of great importance to underwater photographers, the information is relevant and is also the basis of a great discussion on the forum. In a separate article entitled the “State of Nikon DX in 2012”, Hogan makes the following observations:

“Overall, here in late 2012 the state of the DX market is this: Nikon is serving the low-end customer decently, the high-end customer much more poorly. This is not something they should want to continue, especially since those high-end customers (D7000, D300s users) are leaking downwards (to m4/3, NEX, X-Pro1).

Some may think I’m tilting at windmills here (Nikon themselves is probably included in that group). After all, Nikon’s sales have never been higher, and they seem to be growing. Sure, and GM sold a lot of cars right up to their collapse, too. Sales are not by themselves an indication of health of a company or that they understand their customers or what to do for them. Sales can be goosed by sales and marketing techniques that ultimately undermine a company’s brand reputation and user base. Other than Nikon’s FX products, all of their cameras seem to be on constant sale here in the US, with instant rebates the norm, and those goosed upwards whenever sales volume lags a bit. So one thing about DX in 2012 is that it’s constantly on sale. To me, that’s a sign of weakness. I believe Nikon needs to shore up DX before the weakness becomes permanent.”

Continue Reading

A new study (pdf download) of the Great Barrier Reef carried out by Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America shows that from 1985 to 2012, mean coral cover declined in a nonlinear fashion from 28.0% to 13.8% which is an equivalent total decline of 14.2% or an actual reduction of 50.7% in the actual coral cover. Perhaps more disturbingly this should represent an annual decline of 0.53% per year, whereas two-thirds of the decrease has actually occurred since 1998.

The causes of the decline are listed as being: Storms, crown of thorns starfish outbreaks and coral bleaching.

Continue Reading