I don’t think I have mentioned yet that I am headed to Phuket, Thailand Feb 9-17. I learned that I was terribly mispronouncing “Phuket” in the worst of ways. In any event, part of all this testing and experimenting with water housings has a lot to do with this trip. From what I hear the underwater photography there is pretty spectacular.

One of the bigger problems I have been faced with is finding a regular dive buddy here. It’s an awful idea to go scuba diving alone, and I would never do it. My refresher dive instructor mentioned someone who I had actually met a few months ago named Richard. My Dad has known Richard’s family for several years now, so I called him to see if he would be willing to go diving with me and he seemed more excited about it than me (and I was quite excited about it). Richard dives quite a bit so you are going to be seeing more of him, we are planning on going again early friday morning.

Richard called last night to say that conditions today were going to be poor and ask if I still wanted to go.

Having invested a lot of money into my new housing, as well as all of my new dive equipment, I was all for it. I knew that I would have a great time regardless of the conditions because:

1. I am making a new friend.
2. I get to test my dive gear and get situated.
3. I get to learn a new cool location for diving on Maui.
4. I get to try my new Ikelite housing out. My strobes dont arrive until friday, so it would probably be good to get familiar with the housing alone.

In fact, the longer I thought about it, I realized I could come up with at least a dozen more reasons why it would be a good idea to dive today.

We went out to a place he called “The Dumps” and as we expected conditions were pretty much terrible. I am already learning that while wonderful for low light, the 35mm 1.4, is not really the lens I want down there. I think most of the interesting stuff is going to be Macro, and I have a brand new Canon 100mm 2.8 Macro lens dying to get a test run. One thing is for certain- the strobes are going to make a HUGE difference. Not enough good light down there.
This is Richard- He is using a G11 with some Japanese housing. It is really small and light. I need to consider getting one as a back up. Real tough to get any good shots with all the gunk floating in the water. Tiger Striped Sea Urchin – I think I am going to study up on all the Marine life here so I can know all their real names. We saw a freaking MONSTER of a lobster. It was like the size of a dog. I think Richard got a good shot of it on his G11. (See Day 16 🙂

I know I can do better than this!!

Richard told me after “Those were probably the worst conditions I have ever dived in.”

Well another good thing about this is that the images are going to get better. Much, MUCH better! I am able to change all of my settings underwater no problem and feel very comfortable tracking individual fish.

I am excited to have a new friend and to develop into this new area of photography.