Marshall Islands Pics / 5050 Experience

Hey everyone. Got back last weekend from the Marshall Islands. Did a lot of diving on Majuro and spent 3 days at Wau which is part of Mili Atoll. I took about 1700 total pictures.

This is the first time I ever took real pictures underwater, and the first time I ever used my new setup: Olympus 5050, pt-015, Ikelite tray and arm, Ikelite DS-125 strobe, and Olympus WAL. Some things I learned about the setup:

- The camera is very easy to use. I don't know how to use the camera in either A, S or M mode so it does a great job doing all the work itself in P mode.

- I am very glad I picked up the 1gig microdrive before I left. It let me fit over 250 SHQ images on the card.

- I used 2000 mah Powerex and 2100 mah IPowerUS batteries. They lasted far longer than I expeted. I was able to get 2 dives and 150+ pictures out of one set of batteries, with the flash firing everytime and the LCD always on.

- The ikelite basic arm was harder to use than I thought, a lot of my pictures didnt get hit with the strobe right.

- The GBUndersea lens dock didnt fit my camera setup good, so I made this: Lens Dock Bar

Lets get to the point, here are some of the pictures. I have been working on them forever, but I still only have 2 days worth up. Sorry the images are so large, they are all 800x600 and saved at 60 quality.

Last Day. This was my last day at Majuro. I accidentally took all these pictures with the camera set to A. I didnt notice so all of them were taken at F2.3. These are the ones I got lucky on:

Last Day

Wau Island Day 2. These pictures are from Wau. They are sorted into several directories to make it easier:

Wau Day 2

I should also note, that im pretty colorblind, so if I messed up any of the pictures with photoshop don't make fun of me.

Gotta get back to editing.

Enjoy

Dustin

Dustin,

I especially like your clam shots. Cool!

Cheers

James

Some nice pictures there for a first effort. I liked the "longnosed" shots.

Dustin, if this is your first effort they are excellent. Just one point on the web page. The thumbnail pages loaded very quickly but the main pictures seemed to take an age to load (on my PC). What size are the main pictures? Maybe you could reduce their size in order for them to load quicker?

Mark

I agree with mark's comment about main image sizing - Try and keep them below 60 kb.

Also please post your gallery in the correct forum "Members Gallery Links"

Thanks and keep up the good work.

The images are 600x800, and saved ad 60quality. But they still came out to 200k or higher. The shots on land come out to barely over 100k at the same settings. If I went any lower in quality it was too visible in the pictures. Whats the secret?

Sorry about posting in the wrong forum, should the post be moved?

Dustin

600 x 400 @ 72 dpi is fine for a gallery. If you do all your editing first, then resize, then save as JPEG the compression should only become 2:1 and the quality stays very good.

I take it you are using the imageready plug-in: This can only work successfully if you have resized the image first. IMO IR is just a gimmic and not very necessary.

Example: The attached image is 500 x 340 @ 100 dpi - just 63 kb's. Big enough?

I was just wondering about those collection shots....

Was that just someone on the boat collecting those?

I am curious, how many Flame Angels did you see while diving. The only pics I saw, when I briefly looked thorugh your gallery, were of Flame Angels in tubs.

just a little worrisome...

Those shots were from a fish collectors holding station on Majuro. We saw a lot of flame angels on every oceanside dive.

Dustin