Lightroom 2 *RAWKS*

I can't express how much of a joy and time saver Lightroom has been ever since I started shooting with my D40. What happened when I got my D40? I started taking a lot of pictures, that's what. While I was in Indonesia I was shooting over 300 pictures a day. There's no way I'd be able to sort through over 2K+ pictures from a week of vacation in any reasonable amount of time and get them processed without Lightroom.

And now they've fixed the biggest annoyance I've had with it in the new version: lack of support for Nikon's proprietary color profiles. It's only in beta right now, but now I can get my pictures to look as good on the PC as they do on my camera's LCD without a ton of post-processing. Want to see what a difference this makes? Check this out.

And that's not even getting into the other improvements (so much faster! support for multiple volumes!) and new features (that I've yet to really play with).

KBR Day 5

Today was just an amazing day. All four dives were fantastic and chock full of critters. Even got to play around with a couple octopi!

The first dive of the day was at Kapal Indah ("Beautiful Ship"), a wreck dive where we found a pigmy seahorse.

The second dive was at Jahir 2, where the highlights were a frogfish and a leaf scorpionfish (no good shot of the latter though).

For our third dive, we went to Hairball. Spent a long time here with a seahorse and an octopus.

If at first you don't succeed... Went back to Aer Prang 2 to try and catch the mandarinfishes going at it. And joy of joys, there were feeling frisky tonight! As an added bonus, an octopus came by to play while we waited for the mandarinfish to do their thing.

KBR Day 4

Did something unexpected and different today -- drove to the northwest side of North Sulawesi to dive at Pulau Bunaken. Another couple had made all the plans and I just tagged along. It's a completely different sort of diving there, all wall dives where you just drift along the current.

I'd hoped this meant that I'd be able to put my wide angle lens to better use, but the visibility there was working against me and most of my shots came out less than satisfactory. It's entirely possible that I just don't know how to take these kinds of shots/how to work with these conditions...

The first dive was at Mandolin; a fun, relaxing and enjoyable affair. The wall was teeming with life of all sorts, and there were large schools of fishes everywhere (very unlike what I'd been seeing in the Lembeh Strait), but I have to report that there was nothing really impressive per se. This of course only in comparison to the amazing critters I'd been seeing the past couple days.

The second dive at Lekuan 2 was a little better: saw an orang-utan crab as well as a green turtle which swam by us in the open water. Tried to go after it, but couldn't really get a good shot (the visibility issue).

Totally unrelated to diving, but still pretty cool nonetheless was who I went to Bunaken with: Joshua Marston, the writer/director of Maria Full of Grace, who was nice enough to talk a little about the movie business.

I made it back to KBR just in time to go watch the mandarinfish perform their mating dance at twilight. Unfortunately, they weren't in the mood tonight and we ended up spending a really boring 45 minutes hanging out underwater before we called it quits and cruised around for another 35 minutes. The only shot I was happy with from this dive was of a couple nudibranchs:

KBR Day 3

Did another four dives today, one more than anticipated because I wanted more practice with the camera. My discovery for the day is that diving with a big dSLR housing is not exactly a walk in the park. The first dive was a complete blur; all I remember was struggling with the camera and buoyancy control. The good news is that I'm improving with practice and am getting reasonably comfortable with it. My biggest challenge now is that I'm muck diving and only have a wide angle lens instead of a macro lens to get up close and personal with my subject. I may not have be able to get really nice shots of the 4mm pigmy seahorses we found, but I think I managed to get some pretty pictures nevertheless.

A few more numbers for the day:

• spent a little over four hours underwater
• saw two pigmy sea horses (we're talking about 4mm or so here!)
• saw the biggest lobster I've ever seen: about 3 ft in length, not including it's whiskers, which were another 3ft in length!
• saw 1 electric clam wedged into a crack
• saw 1 octopus with 4 legs
• saw 1 cuttlefish with hundreds of colors

KBR Day 2

It's 10pm right now and it's definitely time for bed. Some numbers for today:

• 4 dives (3 day, 1 night)
• almost 4.5 hours spent underwater
• maximum depth of 81 feet
• 3 sea horses (never seen them before)
• 2 cuttlefish (never seen them before either)
• 1 huge puffer fish with a remora latched on to it (totally cool)

And that's just the first day! There were also many moray eels of all kinds, lots of puffer fishes (kept thinking fugu! every time I saw one), and basically a ton more life than I've ever seen any where underwater. Definitely some of the best diving I've ever done.

Tomorrow I'll be bringing my camera along...

KBR

After many hours of travel I'm finally at my home for the next 8 days: Kungkungan Bay Resort in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, where I'll be diving for the next week. Woo-hoo!

The room is amazing, as is the view out my porch. All I'm interested in right now though is some food, a shower, and sleep...

Diablo 3

Haven't played any computer games for a while now (Civilization IV Beyond the Sword was the last one), but I have to say that I definitely got the shivers after watching the Diablo 3's debut trailer. It's been a looong while since I've been tempted to buy a computer game...

I can already hear the click click click. Can you?

Green Change #4

Been doing a lot of driving recently, and with the price of gas as it is, enough is enough. It's time I changed the way I drive and practice a bit of hypermiling:

1. slower starts
2. keep (closer) to the speed limit
3. keep tires inflated
4. ride my motorcycle more since I get almost twice the mileage on it than my car ;)

I've been trying to put this into practice lately and #2 is definitely the hardest. I've been able to keep it under 70 in my car, but on C's V6 Accord it's a bit harder.

As for #3, McCain's been in the news lately for being an idiot on this point.

Diving in San Diego

Drove down to San Diego last Thursday to do a bit of wreck diving with the fine folks from Aquatic Discovery. I haven't dived in California for years because of the cold water here and I'd promised myself that I'd learn how to use a drysuit before trying again.

Which I did, before the trip. I'm happy to report that I'm now a firm believer in drysuits. Even with the rental drysuit that didn't fit particularly well, it was just sooo much more comfortable. It's not 100% dry, but it's a heck of a lot better than a wetsuit, and you're much warmer as well.

On Friday, we dove Lazy Days (where I missed seeing a six gill shark swim by) and Seven Fathom Reef; on Saturday, we dove the Yukon and the Ruby E; and on Sunday, we dove the Yukon twice more. The Yukon, an ex-Canadian destroyer that was sunk to form an artificial reef, was definitely worth three dives.