I came back with about 2000 photos, many of them of stuff I’ve not seen before, so it’s taking a while to do all the cataloguing, ranking etc. As usual, I’m finding the Scorpionfish the trickiest to figure out …

This was a two centre break, and it’s hard to believe that the same area can offer two completely different types of diving.

Bunaken / Tasik Ria

For the first week, I was based at Tasik Ria resort, which is near Manado city (and relatively handy for the airport). I had a small panic when my dive bag went missing at the airport, but a very honest gentleman (whose porter had picked it by mistake) delivered it the following morning - getting it to me 10 minutes before the dive boat left.

Tasik Ria’s lovely, and Danny - the manager - really makes sure you feel welcome. Mind, the thing that struck me about Manado is that all of the people are really friendly.

This is the pool and pool bar - a really nice place to relax between diving and dinner.

There’s also a Spa on site …

… and this is the view at breakfast …

And then there’s the Jetty bar. This is open until later, and I felt at home as soon as I walked in. Stanley - the barman - had a BB King track playing. No point in going anywhere else, then ….

The Jetty bar’s behind the dive boats here - which means there’s a glass of ginger tea waiting to freshen you up when you get back in.

The diving itself is with Eco Divers, and the centre’s on-site. There is a camera room (although I did all my changes in my room), but there aren’t a lot of spares - it’s difficult to import things to Indonesia.

If you’ve dived on a Red Sea dayboat, then you’ll find this all very familiar - the boat has the same layout (saloon, top deck, wet dive deck). The reason you go all this way is to dive on the Bunaken Marine Reserve, which is about an hour or two away - so expect to be out all day, with lunch on the boat. There are two large camera tanks at the back of the boat.

The third dive differs on alternate days. One day you’ll do three dives on Bunaken, the next you’ll do two on Bunaken and one of the house reef. This isn’t actually a hardship, as the house reef has lots of stuff.

The Bunaken park is named after the island where you do most of the diving. Most of the area’s volcanic. There’s a key to (and a map of) the dive sites on the Eco Divers website.

Bunaken island is fairly low-lying, however, and the most significant landmark is the neighbouring island of Manado Tua.

The character of the diving on Bunaken Island is of big drop-offs and gorgeous, colourful wall dives. Don’t expect schools of hammerheads, though. “If you want big stuff …” we were briefed “…you should have gone to Palau”.

There can be strongish currents. Knowing that I’d not get much use out of the wide-angle in week 2, I decided to try it out on Bunaken. However, there was such a lot of macro stuff that I just got frustrated, and didn’t use it much again … another reason was the amount of “fluff” in the water, which meant backscatter.

In the end, this meant that I was limited on turtle shots, and missed out on the the diver-with-coral shots, but - on balance - I felt like I’d got the best of the deal. Maybe the new 12-60mm lens will provide a compromise in future (I got to play with one yesterday, and the focussing is really zippy)…

Other stuff that happened … We saw some pilot whales on the way out to site … and dolphins the next day (no photo of them I’m afraid) … and on our check-out dive a couple of Mantas did a fly-by (no useable shots, I’m afraid) - didn’t see any more all week.

Monica was guiding us most of the week, and she was excellent. All diving is to 30m max. Nitrox is available, but it’s shipped over from KBR (at the moment), so you have to order it in advance. The number of DIN-compatible cylinders is also limited, so it’s worth checking in advance (or taking a converter) if you’ve got DIN fitting regs.

… Oh … and you get some wonderful sunsets …

Eco Divers - who also run the KBR diving - run a “full service diving” service - your kit is set up for you. Generally, this is reliable, but don’t get complacent - you should always check your cam band and air.

So, after 6 days diving, a busload of us transferred over to KBR for week 2.

Kungkungan Bay Resort

You need to know :

• - Everyone just calls it “KBR”
• - It has a 24/7 restaurant - all food is included
• - The first item on the dessert menu is Banana fritters in chocolate sauce
• - I never got to item 2.

This is completely different from Tasik, although, again, the people are really nice. The hotel is carved out of the jungle, and is just for diving. Really. There’s no other reason to be there.

This is in the Lembeh Straight, which is known for “muck diving”. This basically involves rooting around in volcanic sand to find the weird critters that have managed to evolve defence strategies. This neck of the woods (including the Phillippines, Thailand etc.) is also blessed with massive underwater biodiversity. As an example I was seeing over 8 species of nudibranch on one dive - I’d typically find only 2-3 species in a whole week’s diving in Sharm.

I’ll probably cover some of those topics in later posts, however.

All of the dive sites are within a 15 minute speedboat journey from the dive centre. Normally, there’ll be 3 divers to one guide, and two groups on each boat. There were about three boats running when I was there. It’s similar to UK RhIB diving, in that you enter with a backward-roll over the side.

Here’s one of the boats pulling up at the jetty.

Again, there’s a map of the Lembeh dive sites at the Eco Divers web site.

There is a Nitrox compressor here (it turns out around 32%) and you can get a package. Again, all your kit is looked after, and your camera is given a basket. There are soak tanks for your cameras (and nothing else!) between dives.

So - none of this “out all day” stuff. After breakfast, it’s off to the first dive (briefing at 8:05). Most of the dives are for 1 hr, so you’ll be back by 10:00 - there are hot drinks and cakes waiting for you.

The second dive is briefed at 11:05, which means you get back in time for … lunch. You can have a bit of a break here, as the third dive is briefed around 14:35. The sun will be going down behind the hills by now, so the (underwater) light starts to go, particularly on the west side of the straight.

Night Dives are an option every day, but you can set off a bit earlier (with dusk approaching) for a “Mandarin Dive”. This heads off to the next bay along, and the objective is to wait at 6m to see the Mandarinfish mating. They weren’t in the mood with me watching, but - in any case - it was fascinating to see the reef transforming from day into night - the crinoids and shrimp emerging.

Eco kept me with the same buddies - I was with Alan and Tony all week - and we were briefed that “you dive as a family” - taking it in turns to see the different beasties (most of which aren’t going anywhere), rather than elbowing each other out of the way. I think it worked quite well for us …

Anyway - I had the left half of this bungalow.

… And this is the main restaurant / reception (the dive centre’s on the other side).

There’s a balcony round the outside, so you can eat over the water, while the fish play.

I did use the camera room here - there’s plenty of light to check your seals, and a (very useful) air gun. Kim was very helpful when my (cheap) strobe fitting failed, but again, they don’t carry a stock of camera spares.

Electricity - standard European adapters worked. I took my own chargers.

There is wireless but … there’s no broadband behind it (that’s either a Manado thing, or a jungle thing). There’s also a computer, but I took my own laptop. Shooting RAW (and converting to LightRoom), I was seriously running out of space after two weeks and 2000 shots.

Singapore

I took a couple of nights to stay in Singapore on the way back. This was partly because of the way flights worked out, but I also enjoy staying there. And Just as a safety thing, I’ve been told (from a usually reliable source) that there are indications that repetitive flying can increase susceptibility to DCI. So … lots of reasons.

However, Singapore Airlines runs a Stopover scheme which turned this into a mini break. I took one of the trips - out to the Jurong Bird Park. We only had about 2 hours there, though, and after the opening show, there wasn’t really enough time to get around.

I’m always impressed about the way this city has its tourism organised. It may be a bit “plastic”, but it gets a lot of people to where they’re supposed to be, when they’re supposed to be there. There’s a lot of building work going on at the moment for the F1 Grand Prix in September. This is clearly seen as a big leap in status towards establishing Singapore as an international destination, rather than just a stopover hub, and the people are proud of this.

If you’re after electronic stuff, then try Sim Lim Square. Several stories of toys, so you can compare deals easily. There’s a free shuttle bus.

In the evenings, I wandered round Clarke’s quay (lots pf places to eat) and found the Crazy Elephant bar. Live Blues, so - again - no need to move.

I booked through Regal, and flew with Singapore Airlines (Heathrow -> Singapore) and SilkAir (Singapore -> Manado).

… and I’m still working on the photos … just needed to take a break from it …

With the old software, the image, dive and help tip buttons just hung. The first php version hid them. Sorry about all that.
Now, they’ll work. Not as well as with JS switched on - it’s a bit clunky, and not as pretty - but at least the page won’t just sit there looking stupid.
So if you don’t enable JS now:
- You won’t see the email button for the time being
- I’m probably not going to reinvent the slideshow until much later (if ever).
- You won’t get the “Jump-to” functionality on the index pages

The “meta” tags should also be working properly now. That’s probably only relevant for some of the search engines

The nice thing (from my point of view) was that I was able to update functionality for all of the converted albums by changing updating just 8 config files (and my new script versions, of course) - not each of the thousands of image file “container” pages.

I’ll probably still do one more version - to handle multiple-level indexes - but I feel like I’m almost there now.

The next generation of these tools will start to use databases to dynamically generate pages, but that’s probably some way away …

So it was only when I opened up my new php-based album in IE that I realised that there’s a bug. Yup, it’s a bug. Not a problem in IE6, but a whole new thing for people to work around.

The net effect for me is that the name of the dive site - shown in the top bar - doesn’t display.

There’s a bit more documentation at this site .

I’d drafted this post before I started work on the php albums. Then I found (or remembered) that there’s another bug. This time, it’s with the “base href” tag in the HTML header.

It works in FireFox. It works in Safari. It works in IE - until you try to use it in Javascript, when it’s ignored. Nothing new on this one. It’s just another of those PITA bugs that’ll probably never be fixed because so many people have coded around it already.

These two instances sum up the problem - no old bugs can get fixed, and new ones will always be introduced.  There are people who love all this stuff, but they’re probably selling their time rather than wasting their own.

I’m told that the new IE will have “standards compliance” mode which can be specified to the browser. Experience suggests that this’ll just be another stream of bugs to be coded around.

As I’ve said before, this probably wouldn’t have been possible without WOS, as I can develop the pages locally. From my point of view, this should mean that I can change all the pages with one file, rather than uploading a couple of thousand individual pages.

In turn, this ought to mean that - at some stage - I can adapt the site to hadle (for example) mobile devices. - again without needing to maintain each page.

You shouldn’t really notice any changes - unless you don’t have Javascript switched on, in which case some of the buttons will disappear (you haven’t lost anything - they just used to break the site). If you’re in doubt, my Ethics page should explain my policy. I’ll be looking to work through the missing routines in future, but I’m afraid it won’t be top of my list (especially as scripts seem to be enabled in the latest version of IE).

This isn’t the end of this development by any means, and the scripts I’ve got running are still a bit clunky, so I’ll be looking to do something a bit more 1) elegant and b) powerful over the next few months.

The one constraint at present is that the script only handles one level of directory (so albums with subdirectories - as in the Gallery, or the UK collections - don’t work). That’s probably the next short-term goal …

Going away

I take a little notepad PC away with me, mostly for backup storage, but I sometimes do a bit of white balancing in the bedroom when I get back from diving.
I’ll setup a new folder for each trip.

So after each day’s diving, I’ll copy the Raw files from the camera (these are also backed up to DVD before the card’s cleared down) - into a folder called “Originals”.

I’ll then go into LightRoom and select “Import photos from disk”. On the “File Handling” dropdown, I’ll choose “Copy photos as Digital Negative (DNG) and Import”. I ‘ll check the “Organise .. Into one folder” box, and create a subdirectory called “Masters”.
I’ll also check the”Don’t import suspected duplicates” box, so that loads on subsequent days don’t overwrite what I’ve already done.

I’ll also set up a file naming conversion, and put the copyright in the Metadata, but that’s just for me.

Then we get into “triage”. Any tests / really blurry / full of backscatter shots are deleted (and deleted from disk) straight away, by right-clicking and selecting [Delete Photo].

I’ll then do some rough exposure / white balancing, and start identifying picks / rejects. These aren’t final or complete decisions.
I may assign a few keywords - typically the dive number.
Then I’ll head off to the restaurant / bar.

Home again …

When I get home, I copy the folder onto a removable / USB drive, plug it into my (more powerful) desktop PC and start work.

This is where I start keywording in earnest identifying any species I don’t recognise, as well as fine-tuning the exposure / white balancing / hue adjustments etc.
I’ll also work on any cropping that’s needed.

I’ll also review the “Picks”, and assign a rating.

• Photos flagged as “Picks” will be uploaded for printing (one way or another). This is done by clicking “Export”, and picking appropriate options. I’ll output these as maximum quality JPG, no resizing. sRGB colour space seems to minimise compatibility issues.
• “Picks” rated over 3-star will be exported for the website. Same method as above (I don’t use the LightRoom “Web” option at the moment), but constraining to 640 pixels / side.

Before the web pages are generated, I’ll have updated my logbook database so that the web pages can pick up the dive details.
With a smooth run, I can get the images up within a couple of weeks.

The theoretically unfortunate side of this process is that I’m going through two generations of JPG (… although it doesn’t actually seem to hurt too much). This is because LR is a bit limited at the moment in its watermarking and frame generation options - although I may be able to work around those at some stage, if I can get to grips with the Lua-based SDK. There are a few plugins starting to creep out …. I’ll still need to integrate the dive details, but that could happen on the server.

The second of these generations is introduced by JAlbum, which has been absolutely superb software - and the underlying basis for this site - for the last 4 years or so.

MuttzNutz - the new generation

However, the page layouts are fairly settled now, so I’ve been working on reworking my skin to generate php code, rather than the XHTML (which my current version generates) or the original HTML.
I’ll probably be writing more on this later, but as this site’s content is growing, I’m looking for more flexible ways to get to the images. So rather than just a linear record for each trip, I’d like users to be able to select by (for example) species, family or dive site. At the moment, a server-based XML or database solution seems to be the way to go, and SQL’s more in my comfort zone.
This is why I found WOS so exciting - developing php on the host would be so clunky as to be impractical.
I may need to write other bit’n'pieces - to synchronise a server database - which could complicate things a bit, but it should come together eventually …. I hope.

Another advantage of the php approach will be that I can hold just one central template for slides (and hopefully just one for indexes), which means that layout (and some content) changes can be implemented straight away, without needing to regenerate and upload almost 3,000 HTML pages.
This should make it easier to implement support for new technologies, accomodating - for example - mobile web or PicLens.

I’ve just got my prints of my Dahab trip back.

I usually get these from PhotoBox, but this time I got some printed up in one of their PhotoBooks (… they had an £5 off deal running).

I’m really impressed with the quality, even though it’s not especially cheap (but - Hey! this is vanity publishing after all !).

It means the best shots are all in one place, and I’ve got a souvenir of the trip, and also helps me work on my “editing skills”.

What I mean by this is that I typically seem to take about 200 publishable photos in a “Red Sea week”.
I’ll normally print the best in 10″x8″ format (cheap batches start at 20) and the rest as 7″x5″. Obviously, when these cost pennies, I’ve not needed to think which were worth printing.

Now I can fill up to 70 pages … but the medium has different demands.

• I need to make sure that only really good images get in; I don’t want any that will devalue the whole.
• Heavily cropped images may share a page
• Pick only the best shot of each subject. (Actually, I’ll break this rule for really good stuff, but split the shots up, so it’s not too repetitive)
• Remember that you can easily get one shot reprinted. It’s a lot more expensive to reprint a whole bookful of images, so take your time and do it properly.

The only tricky bit seemed to be that I had to load in IE rather than Firefox, but that might be down to a Flash update needed..

It’s really nice to not have to wear specs (or prescription lenses in a mask !)

… This time I went with Doc Dave, from my dive club, and we stayed at the slightly more up-market Dahab Hilton. No photos, but this is on the other side of town from the Reef 2000 dive centre - it’s actually on the sailing / windsurfing lagoon.

Even so, we still dived with Reef (Sinai Divers - who are on the hotel site - tend to do mostly boat dives), and once again I found that this town really chills me out.

This may be the quietist time in terms of marine life (we only saw about 3 morays, for example, whereas there were a couple of dozen back in November) but - as I hope the photos will show - there’s still to see there if you look for it … and the ref is so relaxing.
Booked through DiveTours, who were - again - very flexible and accommodating.

Album to follow …

It’s not that I’m being deliberately rude, but my inbox has been cloggingup with Spam (unsolicited bulk emails) emails - up to 200/day. This meant that there wasn’t enough space for real mail.

My hosting service have worked with the detection/rejection levels (initially some valid mails were getting flagged), and I think we’ve got the level right now, and we’re now deleting identified Spam as soon as it hits the inbox. I don’t see it, so I don’t open it.

I have nothing but contempt for spammers.

These scum have sent out mails “spoofing” one of my domains, and as a result, I’ve now covered these with SPF validation.

I’m sorry if you get one of dodgy mails, but it’s nothing to do with me.

If you do receive Spam from this address that does pass SPF, then please let me know.

If you’re using Thunderbird for email, then the “Sender Verification Extension” can help spot the rubbish …

Four hours later … I’d got Apache, php and MySql up-and-running on my memory stick.

This is sooo cool. I can hold a backup of my blog locally; check out upgrades before they go to the server … and I can take it away on my notepad.

… And I can use it to train or demonstrate where there isn’t a connection.

Now, this is just a development / testing / learning tool - I’m not going to be opening things up too much - but it’s going to make things so much easier.

Oh … and the MySql ODBC connector works with it as well.

I’ve loaded some of these in the Dahab album already, but just to highlight what I mean…
(you can click on the thumbnail images to view a larger size).

The centre top of this first image crops to the second :

It was really good for getting this frisky juvenile wrasse …

This works with the 11-22mm zoom as well. I was amazed with the resolution at this distance :

It’s probably also worth comparing a photo I took on the E900 back in July :

With one I took with the E-410 in November (this is cropped a bit) :