Luko

I will speak for Tawali/Milne bay. I was there in march a few years ago, I was lucky the rain had stopped at my time of arrival a week before the previous tourists had to walk 2km through some hilly jungle to get to the embarkation pier to Tawali because the roads were completely flooded, fortunately no rain the week after. Expect 30-31C water temperature, 3mil wetsuit is more than enough. I thought it would be a mainly muck place but in fact it's a mix of muck on Lawadi (Lots of Cyerce nudis!) and pristine coral reef. You will often return to Lawadi but the other muck dive sites like Samarai pier are much further away and need to get on a short liveaboard, I don't think Tawali resort will take you there unless the Spirit of New Guinea liveaboard is included for a few nights in your package. Ask for Albert for your macro guide he's as good finding critters as many Indonesian guides in Lembeh or Tulamben. Deacon's reef is just next door to Lawadi, it becomes instantly your favorite divesite, pure wide angle : great corals and a fantastic spot covered with tree foliage in the shallows, so you can do shots with vibrant coral colors and sunbeams coming from the surface. Lacey rhinopias (Rhinopias aphanes) can also be seen on Deacon reef. Other sites are mostly coral walls and wide angle : Coral garden and Barracuda reef near to Tawali are also wortwhile,, hammerheads have been reported on barracuda reef however dont count too much on them. The outer reefs that takes a daytrip like Tania's reef are spectacular so much teeeming with reef life, that said I've been wondering if they would be better captured on video than still image (mostly zillions of reef fish but not much bigger fish). Hence during my stay I would state it was about a third macro-2 thirds wide angle. Port Moresby :I recommand staying at Airways Hotel, decent restaurant with excellent australian Wagyu meat priced reasonably compared to the prices we have in Europe. If you have time after your dive trips, you can ask hiring a driver and go around Mo'sby, nothing much to see except for parliament haus which is a real architectural curiosity. What to buy/gifts? You'll find better priced woodcarvings than what they try to sell you at the resorts in a japanese held small shop inside the Gateway hotel, near to Airways. (If you find Nozaki a japanese lady instructor who was working for Lissenung and Tawali, I don't know where she's now, she will give you updates). If you know girls you like to please, I suggest you ask your driver in Port Moresby to take you to the bilum market. Ladies sell the traditional colorful woven bags called "bilum". I bought 5 or 6 and gave them to my female colleagues. I was the king back at work.

1- yes, I would say every othertime I flew to/from Sorong or Makassar with LionAir. It was either canceled or rescheduled. 2- try to get a TransNusa flight if you can, which is more reliable and cheaper for the SOQ-MDC segment. On top of their SOQ-CGK, Garuda has also opened this year a SOQ DPS flight, not everyday though. Problem will be to get a refund from LionAir, it takes many phone calls (you'd want to kill their web bot) 3- as a rule of thumb I always try to get a day early in/out of Sorong and I spend the night at SwissBelotel.

Many thanks! I can vouch for @CaolIla as a buyer similarly. 🙂

I was at Paris show, no specific Inon booth. Although Takuya Torii was on a local distributor booth. Apparently he told everyone Inon had this new strobe prototype out but couldn't show it... from what I understand his bag had been... lost at Tokyo airport. 😄 (fortunately located in Amsterdam/Schiphol but could not do it for Paris show) https://www.instagram.com/p/DEwHSPhIvZR/

Yep. Adobe announced 3 weeks ago a monthly price increase in Europe starting from jan15th up to 18€ per month for the LR+PS bundle (meaning a 50% increase!). That said the yearly price will remain around 144€.

Nice report from a friend. That is if you can read french (I know many of our italian neighbors can) https://www.forum-photosub.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17907

I tried the trial version this morning. Very easy to download and use immediately after. Of course I wanted to trick it on a photo mixing diver bubbles in the distance with some actual backscatter. It eliminated the backscatter without touching to the bubbles : much better than a hand made selection. VERY Impressive.

If by any chance you are not adverse to reading french (you may use Google transaltion as well) this is a Cabo Verde landside and diving report that was written very recently on the Forum Photosub (somehow a french sisterforum to Waterpixels, you'll be welcome to join too btw). https://www.forum-photosub.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=20414

Not for the Visayas though where visibility depends mainly on the sea conditions/weather since it's shallower and sandier bottoms than Anilao/PG. March can be a hit or miss espcially for Panglao/Bohol, in all my stays in the Visayas I had much better conditions and viz late April/May.

Two Waterpixelers trying to get their rollers under 7kgs at the infamous AirAsia post check-in carry-on luggage weight checkpoint. You said it man : Nobody f***s with the AirAsius !

Problem is that the nudibranch taxonomy is continuously evolving (I won't even mention the disagreements between different "schools" and various attempts at categorizing nudibranch families) if you ever compare older books like the ones you mention from Coleman or Debelius (first published 20 years ago or so) with newer ones (say NSSI2 Gosliner, Valdes, Behrens, published some 5-6 years ago) it's completely different, you won't find the same names, even the families are completely different. Hence the older Nudi Id. books are outdated and somehow useless now. I guess the awaited NSSI3 will correct some errors, allocate new names to unnamed sp. nudibranches (about 20% of the nudibranches illustrated inside NSSI2 only get a family name with a sp. number, say Goniobranchus sp.25 for instance) or even propose new families (like Bermudella or Ceratodoris which are already in use but missing in NSSI2). My recommendation would be select some good Websites that are updated to new species names, some of my favorites (but there are many more, depending on your location) : Erwin Koehler's multi location http://www.medslugs.de/E/Pac-W/select.htm S&J Johnson from Kwajalein for Pacific slugs https://www.underwaterkwaj.com/nudi/nudi.htm For Indian Ocean, Ph.Bidgrain's http://seaslugs.free.fr/nudibranche/a_intro.htm There are also excellent Facebook groups like Nudibase where any nudi will be identified by marine biologists. Re- the initial question these are Mexichromis trillineata.

May be I'm wrong but since the first Leica came out with the 35mm format (that was exactly 100 years ago btw) there was no other significant and successful miniaturization in the history of pro/prosumer photography (except for spy cameras if that counts as professional usage...almost forgot the lame analog APS-C try that started pushing Kodak towards the edge of the cliff.). A sort of analog optics glass ceiling, pardon the pun? I dunno... but it seems the history of optics was always in the direction of "the bigger the better". On the other hand integrated computational functionalities will need a wider screen (that is to say if you want to control them, otherwise all the craft is in the machine & back to square one : smaller but powerful Smartphones win, why bother.) that's how SmartPhone sizes are getting bigger btw, so I guess any development in that direction would fall into a size tradeoff or a change of paradigm rather than a pure evolution. Eradicated? Maybe not like Smallpox was. Probably depends on which kind of photographer and what cameras we are talking about. After all, some studio pros are using big PhaseOne cameras, sensor more than twice the size of the FF (60k€ for the entry kit mind you) although the medium format market has got much thinner since digital tech allowed zillion pixels sensors. How I see it, there might be a much smaller niche than currently. If you roughly try segmenting the market : - UWP consumer/beginner : I only have very little doubts on the fact the smartphone will overtake the digital photo market within the next 5 years. - UWP prosumers including most of ourselves on this board. Probably a matter of 10 years, there is currently an ongoing switch from dSLR to the still new MIL cameras that will curb the adoption cycle for the next 5 years or so, what will be the next replacement in 10 years? Just time for the UW accessories to develop. - UWP professionals/film makers : that niche I was talking about, 8.000$ worth per optic, RED cameras etc. Not for me, not for you, 10% on this board maybe? Probably the last virus infested niche. Brands will paraphrase "Professionals, how many divisions have they got?". A point where I don't fully agree is the concept of generalist/non dedicated tools differenciation in the vast history of tech evolution. I'm afraid it's only a semantic criteria to differenciate "us" from "them" at certain periods of the evolution (ie the "Who knows" from the "who doesn't"). To me it's more how it is used than what it was made for, ie. what was the computer made for before digital photography : generalist or dedicated use? Sometimes the tech can drive the usage. Perhaps. However on the things I observe in the long run : - Tech brands often drive the market and the usage of such practise of a "medium art" (Oh wait... I'll explain the reference later) with their innovations, it's an "offer pushed" market rather than a "demand pulled" market (otherwise there would not be so many questions/complaints about strobes for instance). If the market expectancies are reduced, don't expect much innovation, meaning less "dedicated" solutions (talk about Pentax, Minolta, Kodak, Ilford, etc most sticking to old tech. That makes me think I have dozens of 135 and 120 filmrolls in my fridge, they have been sitting there for 15 years, they've probably been into 3 different fridges.) - Whenever some hype excavates long forgotten or lo-tech practises (Lomography, polaroid, cross developped film, lith printing, etc.) almost immediately a computed solution will propose similar outcome with less efforts, resulting in more adepts on the "generalist side" device. An effect of the dSLR to MIL systems migration, probably. That's the keypoint for me. We're talking Philosophy or History of Arts, drifting far away from the initial post, technicalities, etc. We've lost 99% of the readers at that point. That is to say .. errh, 2 readers. So be it and open that second bottle of wine. I've been HATED by photographers saying that : Photography is NOT a real Art. Luckily dear ole Henri backs me, hence I'm not afraid ("je crains dégun" in french Marseillais). Or like Bourdieu said "Un Art Moyen" (with the french pun on "Moyen" understood as both "average" or "physical mean") Not really an Art but a social practise, where both the means and their outcome (emphasizing on the lack of correlation) say more about the photographer social environment with little to do with art values like freedom of creativity. There was far more physical activity with the analog printing process, moving your hands, either burning or dodging parts of the print under the projection of the neg film, controling the temperature and the rocking frequency of the chemicals bath in order to increase contrast of tint your print with shades of color. Why is there anymore anyone shooting with dark room chambers, printing cyanotype, coal transfer or so? these were beautiful prints though, now left for geeks, who wants to be pigeonholed as a geek? Hence the way I see it is that one social practise will evolve along with more general social practises with the means the community are generally using. Whoever would like to return to a more hands-on/minds-on Art might find another way or enjoy being called a geek by young Smartographers throwing pebbles at him for using outdated alu housings with different lenses. Interesting that you refer to music and analog musical instruments but that is a true Art, instruments haven't evolved a lot since a while, isn't it? So I guess Artistry is the real password/vaccine against generalist tech evolution. I think a hint for the future would be asking everyone here not "how they see the tech evolution" but rather "why they engaged into UW photography and their motivations behind." I think it would be a good proxy.

Ben honestly, it's a matter of generation maybe ; although I'm in between Dave and you agewise, I feel closer to Dave's opinion. The dream I have is to leave my 40kgs of photography lugagge home, avoid to drag a 10 to 12 kgs rig on Tulamben's rocky shores and replace it with a smallish rig max 2 kg encompassing the 2Xth generation of an iPhone (that might be called the iLife or something like that then...), no housing needed -since it will be 200m deep waterproof- along with 2 small LED strobes/videolight and perhaps an aberration free wide angle iConverter (thanks to the integrated lens distorsion and color correction software) that would fit in my SMB pocket. I'll skip the moment when old bearded photogs who first had to carry a 4*5" inch chamber camera and climb on a ladder switched their equipment to a handheld 35mm camera called Leica I, allowing for street reportage. it was the start of the trend though... Remember when digital cameras came in 25 years ago? On my side I went digital from the early days we could put a compact Oly 3Mpix into a plastic housing, something the slide shooting serious photogs used to laugh at. Even 10 years after I came across a group of US photogs in Lembeh led by a famous pro photographer (his book was listed into the White House gift list) who was swearing no pixel number would ever outpass slides definition... Hahaha : we can have a good laugh now. The guy was so sure, oh well, another visionary person. On the other hand I see many young UW photographers especially in Asia who haven't practised (nor are interested into) land/studio/street/name-anything-dry photography, many of these guys/gals can achieve correct to excellent UW images without knowing much of the "basics" of photography. They hire one good spotter, as the trend is now to shoot without a strobe but continuous lighting it's easier to get a WYSIWYG photo in the electronic viewfinder, let alone the sensor dynamic abilities : exposure wot? who cares? Repeat 200-300 times a dive, you might get interesting results in the end. For many, it's the results on Instagram that count : hence the iPhone evolution is the natural photographic bean-to-bar automation without the sweat or the knowledge in between. Ok, we might still be currently in the period where the weight of your rig defines your "manhood", although I feel it is in decline, the good times where you would hear ooohs and aaahs on the beach when you bring a dual strobe housing/large converter dome are over. Now the guides in Tulamben are just listing the equipment they already know by heart, sometimes a frown when they notice something special, they'd even snub you for missing an accessory for your new strobe. My Gen Z daughter and her friends don't have the same POV, they don't like to carry check in luggage and pay for it, they don't appreciate the fuss in between shooting the images and sharing them on social networks. It's the fast result and the storytelling around that is valuable, not the process. Let the 'puter do the work. She did good videos with her iPhone and an Amazon case on her first try. You may argue that they don't have the same focus in photography as we do but I am anticipating that the UW Smartphone use will increase the number of people doing UWphoto as much as the evolution from analog to digital, many of whom won't have a photography process focused mind. Some 50 years ago Cartier Bresson abandoned photography for drawing because for him it wasn't real art, he claimed doing photography schematically needed only an eye and a valid finger after all. That's what Smartphone photography would be about : back to the basis in a sort. Add on top people like me don't want anymore to carry weight, I don't see a bright future for the big rigs like we have now. For me that's a deep trend.

Ask Utama, they told me they do and apparently some of the guides like Noris love that.

Wow, that's a reference... (not sure there is enough on my side to stand even a remote comparison... 🥴). But yeah I come from a travel/streetphoto background (you know : a Leica M6 loaded with TriX film, the guy in the back looking the people moving around, waiting for the scene to happen then processing/enlarging the films on the homelab), so it was a nice break from purely Nature photography, involving thoughts on how to scenarize the action. Probably closer to video except that I am really hopeless at shooting video.