Olympus announced yesterday on their website the upcoming release of a dome port, extension ring, and zoom gear, to use the Zuiko 7-14mm F4 wideangle zoom lens underwater in the PT-E01 housing.  Olympus expects to release the port system in July, but no pricing info was given - however the dome is glass so it will not be a “budget” accessory.  According to Olympus they: “now offer a range of 4 underwater lens ports and 2 underwater extension rings to support professional underwater photography using its 6 “Designed for Digital” ZUIKO DIGITAL lenses.”  Of special interest was a hint that they plan to offer a fisheye lens in the future.

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Seaspace 2005 was held in the Reliant Center at the Astrodome complex in Houston June 4th and 5th.  Eric Cheng and I attended the show together again this year, but this time, we did not have any duties, other than checking out the booths, seminars, and workshops of interest to the Wetpixel underwater photography community.  If you are into large “scuba gear shows” like DEMA, then you would have considered this years event to be pretty small.  However, from a photo-centric viewpoint, the show was perhaps the best of the 5 that I have attended.  This article will be a brief summary of the show, as most of the information is contained in the photographs and photo captions.

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Here’s an interesting article that shows that the protests and bad media may be having an effect:

- HK Disneyland considers serving only shark fins obtained by non-cruel means

- HK Disney answers soup critics (June 9)
Disney will only serve legally-harvested shark fin, and will hand out pamphlets to interested parties

On my personal website, I’ve posted a template for a letter you can e-mail to Disney executives (easy, one-click e-mail links also included).

And speaking of protests and media campaigns, Wetpixel member Jason Grimes is also organizing a letter-writing campaign.  Continue reading for more information.

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Join us in South Africa for one of the world’s greatest spectacles of nature.  Every year, the world’s greatest marine migration takes place off the South African Wild Coast. Millions of sardines follow the cold winter currents moving north toward the warm Indian Ocean, bringing with them thousands of predators: dolphins, sharks, whales, seals and marine birds.

Doug Perrine won last year’s British Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year award with an image he took while on a sardine run expedition.

Wetpixel has 10 spots for this amazing trip scheduled for June 21-30, 2006.  Continue reading for more details. APR 26, 2006: THREE SPOTS JUST OPENED UP (LATE CANCELLATIONS).

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DPreview.com reports that a UK based company called Intro2020 is distributing the Zigview angled LCD viewfinder for SLR cameras.  The unit is basically a tiny CCD video camera and LCD monitor merged with a case that mounts over your camera’s viewfinder, much like a right-angle finder.  This unit may be of interest for underwater photographers as it looks like it could be enclosed in a small box and mounted on an underwater camera housing.  The 1.9 inch diagonal LCD display, while probably not fine enough for determining focus, would be very helpful for macro composition.

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