Scuba Diving Vacations

Haven't posted in a bit. Here's a quick video I took while playing around between dives for a minute. We've been having back to back swells come in so the viz has been a bit down on several of our dives, call it 70-80 feet on the bad days in some spots, more in others. The video makes it look worse than it was, it was a cloudy day and the quality's not quite what it should be.

Later,

Steve

I'm playing with the new Olympus ib software for the Pen e-pl1 and other recent cameras. I went down to the Painted Church down the road from where I live in Captain Cook. It's a local landmark. It's an older church, and the minister at the time, having a fair number of parishoners that weren't all that literate (written language was relatively new to Hawaii at the time), painted pictures to help illustrate his teachings. It's quite fabulous.

Anyways, I tried the panorama function that the Oly Pen camera has. You can set it in panorama mode, take pictures which have some lineup helps/prompters on the LCD, then go into the editing program and stitch it all together. This particualr image has three separate photos involved. One merging is pretty obvious, but really doesn't affect the image, the other is less obvious. I managed to merge RAW photos, but it doesn't allow a RAW editing afterwards, I'm hoping I can do a RAW editing then merge the photos... if this happens, then... YAHOO... I can go underwater and take panoramas that are color corrected. Give me a few days (possibly weeks, I've got a full schedule ahead starting Saturday for a couple weeks at least) to figure that one out.

Anyways, for a first panorama, and about 5 minutes in front of the computer, I'm happy.

Later,

Steve

Aloha,
Well, it's about time. Unfortunately Adobe CS and CS3 don't support the Pen series of cameras, you need CS4 or later to find an update that'll support RAW editing for those cameras. The cameras come with Olympus' own editing and file management program. I'm working off two 4-5 year old computers and neither of them has a functioning DVD/CD drive, got on to Olympus' site this morning and downloaded their program. Yay. It's slower than Adobe's RAW editor, doesn't seem to do as many of the things I want to do, but it'll do 'til I get a new computer at some point in the future and load CS5 on to it.

I've only converted two shots so far, so I can't say much about the program. It does have a nice grey dropper white balance feature which works well for underwater shots... lots of greys on the reef with all of our hard corals. You can just put the dropper on a likely gray spot (OK, since this blog is read internationally I'm covering all my bases by interchangeablly using "gray" and "grey" I guess... Don't remember which one I should be using anymore) and click and the photo will hopefully go to it's natural color rather than the cyan/blue you typically get underwater. I should do some screen shots some day to show it. I tried it on a couple photos and they came out looking a bit too colorful, might have to tone down the saturation a bit on some pictures.

Here's a quick shot of a couple yellow tangs picking at algae amongst the finger corals. Tangs are herbivores and graze pretty much all day long. A lively reef will be coverered with numerous species of tangs.

Later,

Steve