The Nature, Wildlife and Pet Photography Forum is running the first of its photo contests, with both daily and monthly winners. Daily winners receive name recognition, and monthly winners receive a small B&H Photo gift certificate. Additional proceeds from the first contest will go toward a Hurricana Katrina fund.
Be sure to read the terms and conditions carefully, as NWP retains rights to use your photo for advertising and promotion.
LAUPS and NCUPS (SEA 2005) have issued a last call notice for their 2005 photo contests. The deadline for SEA 2005 is October 7 (postmark), and for LAUPS, September 23. Both of the contests have fantastic prizes, and are worth entering. Good luck!
More information: [LAUPS Photo Competition] [NCUPS Sea 2005 Contest]
Wetpixel user triswebb received a reply from Amphibico about a new housing for the new Sony HDR-HC1:
We have had a great success with our new Phenom FXZ1 housing… Our engineers are designing [the housing for the Sony HDR-HC1, and it] should be available this fall. October or November. Cost will be $1995US for the basic Dive Buddy EVO HC1, consumer version one electronic grip, manual white balance, we will also have a pro version available in December cost around $2800US have a second electronic grip with added manual focus and also have auto/on /off exposure. Both will have access to the manual white balance. We will have a preview on our site in about 2 to 3 weeks.
Underwater Digital Video Made Easy by Steven M. Barsky, Lance Milbrand, and Mark Thurlow is the latest book from Hammerhead Press of Ventura, California. The authors are professional cameramen with a combined total of over 37 years in the field of underwater video production. Some topics covered are:
- Camera Selection
- Accessories
- Shooting Topside in the Marine Environment
- Lighting Underwater
- Maintenance
- Housing Selection
- Editing
- Travel
- Shooting Underwater
- Gear Set-Up
Continue reading for a press release and complete informatoin about the new book.
Nikon has recently released a limited SDK to Adobe which provides the conversion information for the “as-shot” white balance as recorded in the Nikon NEF file. This is a relief for Nikon shooters who wish to use Photoshop CS2 but it is not a complete solution for other 3rd party sofware companies, as the data is still encrypted. Read the full article for the press release from Nikon and click the discussion link to see what our members have to say on this topic.
Canon recently announced the XL H1 camcorder, which features uncompressed HD-SDI (SMPTE 292M) and SD-SDI (SMPTE 259M) output, as well as Genlock input and SMPTE time code input and output for multi-camera shoots. Other features include customizable open-architecture approach, selectable frame rates including 24F, and multiple output options.
Delkin has finally released drivers for Mac OS X support for their family of CardBus 32-bit PC card flash memory readers. Both the Compactflash and 5-in-1 cards are supported. I *highly* recommend purchasing one, if you have a PC card slot in your Mac notebook. I routinely get upwards of 8-9MB/sec when transferring data from fast CF and SD cards, compared with around 1MB/sec when using a non-CardBus PC card CF reader. For some perspective, that’s 2 minutes a gigabyte instead of 15! Also, I’m not a huge fan of dongles sticking out of my computer, and much prefer to have both a CF and 5-in-1 reader in my card slots at all times.
If you need to see something more formal, check out the test at DPReview.
Wetpixel is proud to announce an expanded volunteer moderating team of long-time community members!
The new moderators are excited to take leadership roles in various areas of our online community forums here at Wetpixel. New moderators include Todd Mintz, Dave Burroughs, Julian Scheunemann, Mike Veitch, Mark Thorpe, Drew Wong, Leslie Harris, Luiz Rocha, and William Heaton. James Wiseman and Alex Mustard continue to be co-administrators, and Herb Ko and Craig Jones continue as moderators.
To see a breakdown of moderators and their respective areas of expertise, see Wetpixel’s about page. Please join me in welcoming our new moderating team!
A technical course in underwater photography and videography will be given at the Bimini Biological Field Station on 12-21 January 2006. [Wetpixel editor Eric Cheng spent a month at the Sharklab in 2003] Course lectures will merge the latest in digital photography and high definition videography techniques with information on shark biology. Dr Samuel H. Gruber director of the Bimini Biological Field Station and Piers Warren, Director of Wildeye, writer, photographer, lecturer in wildlife film-making and founder of Filmmakers for Conservation will offer a series of lectures combined with field trips to reliably encounter a variety of species including lemon sharks, bull sharks, blacktip sharks, reef and blacknose sharks and possibly other species…
Sony has announced the groundbreaking Cybershot DSC-R1 camera, the first all-in-one camera to contain a large, 10.3-megapixel, APS-sized CMOS sensor. The DSC-R1 supports both CF and Memory Stick/Pro cards, and has 24-120mm focal length (35mm equivalent).
Although the DSC-R1 is bigger and heavier than a Canon Digital Rebel XT + kit lens, this is really the direction in which we’ve all been waiting for digital cameras to go; whereas in the film days it was possible to take high-quality images with a small camera, these first years of digital imaging have made it impossible to acquire clean images without a large camera. Also, the Sony RAW files are 20.0MB each—even larger than those produced by a 16.7-megapixel Canon 1Ds Mk II. Why? Who knows.
For more information, check out DPReview’s hands-on preview.