Posted by Dick J on June 26, 2005 at 19:38:33:
In Reply to: Novice UW photographer succumbs to Dark Side posted by Dick (Analog?) on June 26, 2005 at 19:32:26:
Yes, it really did happen. I just got back from a 3-day trip to the outer Channel Islands aboard the Vision. The trip was loosely organized by Ken and Rita Ashman of California Digital Diving. I was able to spend 3 days in the company of some very good digital UW photographers, and did my best to absorb as much as I could, as fast as I could. I figure I gained at least a 6mo. head start compared to stumbling/fumbling along on my own. It’s still a steep learning curve, I’ll readily acknowledge.
The diving was exciting, though I’m sure everyone was a little disappointed with the water conditions. Surprisingly, the best conditions we found were at Pt.Conception where we did dives on the SM-1 and Gosford wrecks, with visibility in the 15-20ft range and not too much current. The worst conditions were around San Miguel (both front and backside), with visibility ranging from 5-15ft. We also did two dives on Santa Cruz’s frontside, and things improved a little, with a few patches of 20-25ft visibility. Water temp was 53degF at Pt.Conception and San Miguel, and warmed to 56fdegF on the frontside of Santa Cruz. I brought macro and wide-angle lenses, but never took the wide-angle out of the box.
I’ve posted some photos from the trip, at the link indicated below. They’re not very well organized or presented, as I’m scrambling to find a way to make web pages in FrontPage that will work with the Mozilla/Firefox browser. The only captions available appear when you do a mouse-over action on the thumbnails.
Kindest regards to all, from the Dark Side