The Ocean Art competition, organized by Underwater Photography Guide, has announced it’s winners for 2010. Judges this year included Chris Newbert, Martin Edge, Marty Snyderman, and Bonnie Pelnar, and the competition will award some $67,000 worth of prizes.
Keri Wilk was awarded best of show and once again, it is great to see so many Wetpixel members in the results. Many congratulations to all the winners.
After a few months of record sea turtle strandings in Massachusetts and many hours caring for these animals, the New England Aquarium’s Marine Animal Rescue Team was itself “rescued” by the United States Coast Guard. After a special request for help, the U.S. Coast Guard airlifted 20 Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles from the New England Aquarium to a rehabilitation center at SeaWorld, Orlando, Florida. The turtles were transported from the Aquarium’s Rescue Center to Hanscom AFB, where they were loaded into a Coast Guard C-144A Ocean Sentry aircraft and flown to Florida.
All the turtles arrived safely and will be rehabilitated before being released back into the wild. (All images by US Coast Guard).
Sony has announced the release of a series of SD cards, comprising three ranges: Expert, Experience and Essential. The last two both have Class 4 transfer rates of up to 15MB/s, whilst the Expert series has a rate of 22MB/s (Class 10). They are available in capacities from 2GB to 8GB in the Essential range, 2GB to 32GB in the Experience and from 8GB to 32GB in the Expert range. Sony’s File Rescue HD software shipped with the Experience and Expert ranges, can retrieve or repair damaged or deleted AVCHD movies recorded with any brand of camera/camcorder as well as JPEG, MPEG-1 and MP4 files.
Sony expects that the cards will be available January 2011. Prices have not been announced yet.
On December 10, 2010, Wetpixel publisher Eric Cheng and Pam and were married at San Francisco City Hall with their siblings as witnesses. They both have expressed their thanks to their friends for their love and support and said that:
“Even though our elopement only included mostly family (and not even our parents!), you were all in our thoughts.”
I’m sure all Wetpixel members will join me in wishing them heartfelt congratulations, long life, joy and happiness together. Photographs of the happy couple were taken by Adam Tow and Rae Chang.
The European Commission wants to eradicate the practice of shark finning completely from EU waters and fishing vessels from the EU wherever they operate in the world. In order to do this, they need 369 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to sign the Written Declaration (0071 /2010), launched by four MEPs, Chris Davies from the UK, Sirpa Pietikäinen from Finland, Daciana Octavia Sârbu from Romania and Jean-Paul Besset from France, which calls on the EU Commission to deliver a proposal to completely prohibit the removal of shark fins on-board vessels by the second anniversary of the Community Plan of Action for Sharks (February 2011). So far, only 329 MEPs have signed, and the Declaration will lapse unless complete on 20 December.
Project AWARE has published a list of MEPs and also lists whether they have as yet signed or not. For those of you living in Europe, please take the time to write to the MEPs from your country urging them to sign the Declaration. Template emails for MEPs are also available via the Project AWARE site.
The EU fishing fleets are responsible for one in three of the shark fins in trade in the world. This is a golden opportunity to stop this.
The European Commission’s Fisheries dept is now seeking a public consultation whether to completely ban shark finning in the EU. Regulations now basically banned finning, but a loophole allowed by the EC by issuing special permits to allow fishermen to remove fins. There is now a movement within the IUCN which is calling for the EC to stop all permits and close off the loophole entirely. The EC Fisheries has started an online consultation for EU citizens to gauge the popularity of banning finning entirely. So to all the EU citizens who remotely care about sharks, get your family, friends (facebook, myspace, twitter etc etc) out there to write in to support this move!!!
The Pixel Farm has released Airgrade, which emulates professional film and TV grading tools, and combines a powerful Mac-based grading engine, with a wireless remote control on the iPhone. Users roll a 3D trackball and rotate a radial wheel on their iPhone to adjust precise tonal ranges using Lift, Gamma, Gain controls – recognized by professional colorists as shadow, midtone and highlights and a saturation control for overall colour intensity. The results appears on the Mac, or on any other connected monitoring device, such as a digital projector. A shake of the iPhone resets the parameters. The software is designed to be a great tutorial tool, as well as a powerful grading engine is its own right.
The software is a free download, and the iPhone app is available in the iTunes store.
Apple has just released an update for Aperture 3, bringing the latest version to release 3.1.1. This addresses problems with iLife ’11 compatibility, importing, upgrading, adjustments, publishing to the Web, slideshows, and vaults. One key bug fix is that when uploading images to a Flickr Pro account, Aperture will now upload full-resolution images.
The latest update is available via software update or from Apple.
Wetpixel moderator Sterling Zumbrunn has published a comprehensive review of the Olympus PEN E-PL1 camera and PT-EPO1 housing on Backscatter. He introduces the EVIL camera as:
Honey - I shrunk the SLR … and the price!”
The article is the result of extended testing of the system in the Cocos Islands, the Digital Shootout in Bonaire and in the Californian Channel Islands. Sterling outlines the pros and cons of the system, including some specific issues with the housing controls, and goes on to introduce and evaluate the dome ports available from third-party manufacturer Zen Underwater. Finally, he compares it to conventional compact camera offerings and SLRs, and finds that the E-PL1 effectively bridges the gap between the two.
Wetpixel moderator Shawn Heinrichs is involved in the making of a documentary highlighting the increasing trade in manta body parts for the “medicinal” health trade. The film begins with the views of naturalists and researchers, attempting to unravel the mysteries of the manta. It then goes deep undercover, from remote fishing villages to bustling cities, to understand and expose the trade that is threatening the mantas future. Finally it meets with those that are having a positive effect, and shows how we all can make a difference for these creatures.
The final product will be in Mandarin, Canto, English, Spanish and other languages, to cater for a world-wide audience.