After-movie of the Alex Mustard workshop in Zeeland (NL)

Hi,

This is the official after-movie of the workshop weekend with Alex Mustard in Zeeland (Netherlands) from 6-8 of August 2010.

... coming to a cinema near you...

... starring the doctor...

Nice boat, too (and no sloshing from side to side)!

... AND SeaCam photo-porn!

Tim

EPIC HERO MUSIC! COOL VIGNETTING! SAUSAGE-FEST!!

Looks like it was a great time. I would love to dive Zeeland sometime.

"He's finally coming"

"He's finally coming"

Get your mind out of the gutter, Steve.

Looks like a great time! Attending one of Alex's workshops is definitely on my to-do list!

"He's finally coming"

Great. And now it is on the front page too!

It was a really enjoyable workshop - although I didn't dive as much as I wanted as I hurt my back on the first night - so decided not to aggravate it further (it is fine again now).

The workshop was in Grevelingen lake - which is a marine lake (salty, but non-tidal). The visibility was poor 2-4m (6-12ft), but the amount of life was amazing. The number of (clawed) lobsters is beyond belief - 100s per dive - the more you swim the more you can see!

The photographic challenge was to produce striking images in the low visibility, particularly as most of the creatures like to pose on the mud/sandy bottom. The favoured approach was using a single strobe, fitted with a snoot (but not a spotlight snoot - a much wider one) to create a single source, hard, directional light. This allowed us to create clean images, with black backgrounds (even when the background was mud), such as the example, below, which is a screen grab of a lobster from Lightroom - to show what can be achieved in camera:

where are the women?

Must have been on the waiting list, Mike. We only had one female photographer, but I reckon that the entire 15 person waiting list for this trip was ladies! Maybe.

There are plenty female UW photographers who shoot in cold water, but my tropical trips definitely tend to have a more even male/female ratio. My manatee trip this year was 70% female participants!

Alex

Just for Mike, the Girl/Boy ratio definitely correlates with water temperature!

For my Cayman workshops in January 2011 the weeks looks like this:

Week 1 (still 4 spots to fill):

girls 60%, boys 40%

Week 2 (full)

girls 58%, boys 42%

Alex

haha.. just goes to show, women really are smarter than men

Or men are just more desperate than women to do things like this