The fire and subsequent explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform on April 20 this year has set in motion the worst oil pollution incident in the Americas since the Exxon Valdez disaster on March 24 1989. The uncapped oil well is releasing an official estimate of 5000 barrels (21000 gallons) per day, although many are saying that this may actually be closer to 60,000 barrels (252,0000 gallons). By comparison, the Valdez incident released an estimated total of 250,000 barrels.

Continue Reading

Join Eric Cheng and Alex Mustard in an underwater photography expedition to Alaska in June 11-23, 2011. We’ll be aboard the liveaboard dive vessel, the Nautilus Explorer, for 13 days of exploration between Sitka and Ketchikan.

Photographic subjects will likely include beautiful Alaskan topside scenery, kelp forests, white plume anemone forests, Steller’s sea lions, rockfish, anemones, crabs, shrimp, amphipods, ratfish, and much more. Reef walls are nearly 100% covered in bright orange, red and yellow invertebrates! I can’t wait to go back.

Click through for full details! (and be sure to check out the Wetpixel expeditions page for all of our trips)

Continue Reading

Olympus is running a contest for the best “vision” of what you’d do with your own Olympus PEN camera (and underwater housing, for this community). We think there could be some really great proposals from underwater photographers.

Six proposal winners will get PEN cameras and the funds to bring their proposals to life, and one winner will have his/her work displayed on the giant video board at the US Open. Continue reading for full press release.

Continue Reading

Aquatica has announced another new housing in their HD Wave series for the popular Sony HDR XR550V/CX550 and Pro HXR-MC50 HD cameras. This all aluminum housing features mechanical controls for all key camera functions, and a new 30 degree angled 3.5” viewfinder. It also has a touch screen control for all menu access, including the manual white balance function.  The 6.5lbs(3kg) housing has a wide angle port with macro capabilities, giving a multi-purpose performance lens with about 90˚ FOV and full zoom through, right up to 15” from the subject. A dedicated macro flat port is also available as an extra.

Continue Reading

Tom Hogarty of Adobe has published a preview of the lens correction technology that will be included in the forthcoming Lightroom 3 and the Camera Raw 6 plug-in.This is a development of Adobe’s non-destructive editing technology and is designed to address lens correction via two methods: Lens Profiles and Manual Correction. It will encompass geometric distortion(barrel and pincushion distortion), chromatic aberration and lens vignetting characteristics.

A handful of lens profiles will be provided by default and a Lens Profile Creator Utility will be posted on Adobe Labs allowing photographers to create their own lens profiles using a simple procedure. There are also manual distortion corrections that extend beyond traditional geometric distortion and provide horizontal and vertical transform adjustment. Read on for a video on this subject.

Continue Reading