First Humpback of the Season

I just spent a few days with my family in Kona Hawaii. I only had one day to get out and dive in the crystal clear waters of the Big Island. The first dive was pretty uneventfull. While on my safety stop, that all changed. The first humpback of the season showed up and made a couple of pass-by's! This is my first humpback i have ever seen underwater. I have not had the good fortune of traveling to Tonga, Rurutu, Silver Banks and other humpback locations yet.

Wouldn't you know it though...my cam was off and i was all set to surface. When the giant showed up i only had seconds to switch on and shoot away. Basically i was running full auto (focus, wb, iris, etc) so the video is not great (focus hunting and not sharp). Also, i had my ultra wide (weitwinkel) lens on so even though this felllow was reasonaly close, the uwa makes it look quite distant:( I consider this a "memory" capture:)

Regardless, i am very excited about this unexpected first encounter. There is something special when you do not plan on seeing something so magnificent and it just shows up!

And i still stuggle with getting it to 16:9 (no matter what i try:() so here is the link:

http://www.bluespheremedia.com/web-videos_...back_800kps.mov

cool.. although i didn't watch... hahah

i want a whale too!

yep, nothing beats your first encounter, you'll remember it all your life.

darren

Shawn,

You lucky bastard! ...I'll take 2 or 3 please.

Nice one Shawn. I see you've taken the comments about your watermark to heart It's microscopic now

Nice one Shawn.

I see the clip was 640/360 with 1.1 Aspect Ratio. Not sure why it does not show it like that when embedded.

Try it at 320/180, might be getting cropped due to the large size.

Wags,

I bet that's it. It is just cutting off the sides and not resizing...likely too big. I'll see if i can adjust.

Yah...tired of the "your watermark is annoying" comments;)...now don't go stealing my videos!

Shawn

I was using the Delogo plugin for Virtualdub the other day to clean up a big lump of crud on my baby whale shark footage and it does a fine job. I imagine it would have your new tiny logo for breakfast so it is an issue to think about.

My view now is to make the watermark pretty readable and then let them steal away, within reason.

As a small operation, if you try to control unauthorised use of material in the digital age you just end up totally stressed out and with no time to do anything else.

There's one scumbag who's built half his site from my video grabs without even asking ( http://ridder.punt.nl/index.php?slide=&amp...2&foto=true and the next few pages too ) but what can you do?

Anyway, back to the whale...