As most know, the Wetpixel website is in stasis and may be turned off at any point. Eric Cheng, who ran Wetpixel through its glory years, recently downloaded the entire site and being a software whizz, set about creating an extensive Wetpixel Wiki to chart the history of Wetpixel and the first 20 years of digital underwater photography.

You can dive into it here:

https://wetpixel.echeng.com

For me this was a unique and special period in underwater photography. As we can all easily appreciate, digital cameras transformed our activity in almost every way. And serendipitously, and just as importantly, this took place in the first decade of people truly being online (and before they were distracted by social media). This meant it was the first time underwater photographers from all around the world could chat and share information together in one place. However niche your interest, you could find the others who shared it. And it was exciting to finally be able to chat to so many other shooters (something we already all take for granted).

Digital cameras also brought a load of new people into the hobby, and a load of new talent too. And with lots of problems to overcome in those early years (and finally an objective assessment of techniques, made possible with instantly reviewable images) the site attracted almost everyone who was interested from brand new hobbies to almost all the leading professionals. As one member commented at the time, it was like finding a golf forum where Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods would be amongst those answering your questions! It was tremendously exciting time of rapid progress in gear, technique and imagery. As I said, special days.

Anyway, Eric got AI to read 8,000 articles, 400,000 forum posts, 5,700 comments, 1,500 news items posted between 2000–2023 and watch all 302 episodes of Wetpixel Live - and then to use all this information to construct the Wiki: the history of the film to digital transition and then the different waves of digital technology arriving, and to identify some of the movers and shakers of that period, and the story of Wetpixel itself (you'll see that Waterpixels.net is promoted in the history as a successor). It is interesting to see what an emotionless AI pulls out as the key events, as opoosed to what I would as an emotional human!

The Wiki is extensive and a great resource. If it is well received, I am sure that there is more that could be done with such technology and the Wetpixel archive. It is also possible to comment and suggest improvements.

Alex

Wow, what a great historical resource. Thanks for sharing, Alex.