Howard and Michelle Hall have just returned from a stay at the Lembeh Resort, Lembeh, Indonesia. As is their wont, they have posted a video of the “Creatures of the Lembeh Strait”, capturing some amazing behavior and critters. These include flamboyant cuttlefish (hunting, eating, laying eggs and hatching), a hairy frogfish feeding and a hairy octopus.
The Northern California Underwater Photographic Society (NCUPS) has announced the winners of the forty-seventh annual SEA International Underwater Photo and Video Competition. Judges selected the winners from over 500 entries sent by entrants from 21 countries around the world. The winner of the Bob Commer Award of Excellence is Eduardo Acevedo from the Canary Islands with a macro shot of a fish with a mouth full of its eggs. TNCUPS reports that the quality of all the entries was extremely high this year and the judges had to work hard to select the winners.
Full details of all the winners and their entries are available on the NCUPS website. Congratulations to all the winners from the Wetpixel community.
Producer Lou Douros has launched an appeal on Kickstarter to provide funding for a sequel to his film “In The Wake Of Giants”. The film titled “Northern Wake” will focus on efforts in Alaska to disentangle whales from discarded line, nets, ropes and other entanglements.
“The humpback whales that migrate between Alaska and Hawaii often find themselves swimming through and getting entangled in marine debris, fishing gear, boat moorings and other gear found in the water column. These entanglements have involved hundreds of feet of rope, nets and buoys. At times the animals have been found to have carried the gear thousands of miles over extended periods of time. Exhausted, emaciated and otherwise impacted by the gear that entangles them, many of powerful mammals eventually succumb to hungry predators or disease.”
In the Alaskan case, commercial fishermen are working together with conservationists and managers to free entangled large whales and reduce entanglement threat. Northern Wake will explore the collaboration between ocean managers and fishermen as they prototype better ways to coexist with the environment upon which we all rely.
XIT 404 will release a series of new products at the Beneath the Sea (BTS) this weekend. Originally debuted at DEMA is 2011, the SOLA Remote Trigger allows the user to switch SOLA 500, 800 and 1200 lights on and off, as well as control power levels and, where applicable red light, from the housing handles. The kit consists of a 20” cable, XIT cable ties, SOLA light trigger and housing trigger switch. It will be available to order at BTS at $130. The Slide Mount allows the attachment of Locline arms to a 1/4” threaded hole on the housing. It retails at $60. Lastly, the company has produced a silicon rubber cable tidy called the Cable Tie. These retail for $5.
We have a few spaces left on the Wetpixel Vancouver Island Expedition. The area offers some of the world’s finest cool water diving and the trip will feature swimming with giant pacific octopus, stellar sea lions, the rich colorful walls at the famous Browning Pass and more.
The dates are from 27 August until 4 September and the base is God’s Pocket Resort on the North end of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. If you are interested, please contact trip leader Jason Bradley as soon as is possible for more information or to book.
Adobe has released a beta version of its Photoshop Creative Suite (CS) 6 on Adobe Labs. The new version features a redesigned user interface, a redesigned crop tool, new Patch and Move tools with Content-Aware options, Camera RAW version 7, a Blur Gallery (Tilt-Shift, Iris and Field Blur) and video editing in CS 6 is no longer limited to the extended version.
Photoshop CS6 beta is a free download, but a log in is required using an Adobe log in. There is a full list and specifications of the beta available as a pdf download too.
The Dahab Festival of Culture and Watersports has announced that it will be holding its underwater photography competition. The event will be held from 14 to 18 April in Dahab, Egypt, with the results being released on 20 April. Categories for entries include, macro, fish portrait, portfolio and creative and there is a one-off entry fee of €10 for the contest.
Full details are available from the Dahab Festival’s website.
Issue 6 of Anima Mundi magazine is now available to download. The April 2012 issue features a spectacularly illustrated article about frogfish, entitled “What a Big Mouth you have” as well as photo essays on the colorful hummingbirds of Mindo, Ecuador, snakes of Costa Rica and a portfolio of black and white images of elephants at Etosha by Christopher Rimmer.
Anima Mundi is a quarterly publication available as a free download in high or standard resolution pdf format.
Nauticam has announced the release of a housing for the Panasonic Lumix GX1 EVIL camera. The NA-GX1 is billed as a compact and lightweight housing, with key GX1 camera controls available from a grip sculpted into the side of the housing. It is supplied with a choice of hand strap or left/right handle, and features the mini locking port release system used in other Nauticam mid-range housings. Nauticam will be supporting the Lumix 14-42mm kit lens, the Lumix G Fisheye 8mm, Lumix 7-14mm, and the Panasonic Leica 45mm macro lens. In addition a new port and zoom mechanism for the Panasonic Lumix G X Vario PZ 14-42mm is being introduced at the same time.
The NA-GX1 will retail at $1,200 and will be available from the end of March 2012.
The Daily Mail newspaper has reported that the European Fisheries meeting in Brussels seems to be on its way to effectively ban the removal of shark fins whilst at sea within European Union (EU) waters or on EU registered boats. This will force fishing vessels to land “whole shark” which makes the catching of sharks much less profitable. At the same meeting, EU Fisheries ministers also sought support for a ban on the practice of discarding fish back into sea because they fail to meet qualifications or are commercially undesirable. It is estimated that EU nations combined account for the second-largest share of shark fin entering the trade, with 14 percent of the world’s catches and that half of the whitefish and 70 per cent of the flatfish caught by fisheries are thrown overboard again.
It was feared that French and Spanish fisheries ministers would object to the new policies, but this does not seem to have occurred. The proposals still need to go before the European Parliament before they become law.