By helicopter over the Grand Canyon

I almost hate to put up this post, because it will push my December great white shark trip down the page. Oh, well.
On January 13, 2010,  I made the four-hour drive over to the Grand Canyon and hopped on a helicopter.

It is a fabulous ride, eight thousand feet above the Colorado River.

Even though I have been at the North Rim and at Havasupai, the view from the air reinforces the colossal size of the Canyon.

It is Winter, of course, so the crest of the canyon walls and the surrounding Kaibab National Forest are brushed with snow.

I hope to do the flight again later in the Spring, with the hot colors of a brighter Sun. Still photos only suggest what it's like up there, so let's try some videos.

That gives you the idea! That is early in the flight, circling out over the Colorado. A little later, I pointed the video camera out the pilot's window across the immensity of the canyon. Pictures and videos struggle to do more than suggest the vast size of these formations.

The special contribution of Winter is snow in the upper reaches of the canyon. The snow betrays no tracks, accenting the remoteness and the impenetrable nature of these formations.

Well over a century ago, local Indian tribes would not tell the European explorers that there were safe ways to cross the Grand Canyon. The Spanish and other stried for years and finally gave up, declaring the Grand Canyon 'worthless.'  In this century, we now know better.

Okay--now scroll down the page and enjoy those sharks!!

Great White Shark in 3D video!!...

This was shot with the new Fuji 3D WD camera in a RecSea housing marketed by my long-time pal Howard Rosenstein of Fantasea.com. This is exactly the effect I had hoped to capture. Unfortunately for me, the instruction manual was so bad I didn't realize that the 3D function had worked--or I'd have shot a lot more!

Japanese companies should hire Americans to write their !#!$!%!^! manuals!

Still, this captures the big shark known as Big Bro as he examines me. The 3D camera only has a 35mm lens, so it can't take the wide angle shots like my stills in the earlier posts below. The shark has to be coming straight in--which Big Bro obliged me by doing.

By the way--of course, you can't see the 3D effect unless you have a 3D TV or computer monitor. They will be replacing current sets over time. At that point, Big Bro is coming for you!.

Do you get the idea that Big Bro is intensely fixated on the Chicken in the Basket?

The chicken does...

Here's another clip. It goes without saying that I'm heading back to South Australia with the 3D rig in June now that I know it works.. Stay tuned!:

He's ba-a-a-a-a-ck, Part two

Please don't miss my first post on this fabulous trip to South Australia, just below this one.  Now for part two!

That is Big Bro, a big shark, searching for the bait. If you look in the water in the background, you see a messy kind of mist affecting the picture.

The shot above shows you where that comes from:  It cost me lots of pictures--think of it as sharks in a snowstorm. Sigh.
However, there were some really good dives where the cages weren't being tossed around by the swells.

That's our pal Big Bro as he prowls in the open water.
We also had another sea lion entertainment. A sea lion came to the boat and repeatedly buzzed Little Bro.

The pesky sea lion henpecked poor old Little Bro unmercifully.

It all ended in a kamikaze attack.

Little Bro lost interest in the sea lion, and the sea lion drifted off. Later, Little Bro made an amazingly savage attack on a handing bait.

I surely had a lot of fun dodging the big teeth as the big bull known as Big Brother came by!!! Sometimes I pulled the camera back as here with not much time to spare.

That was another shot from Mark Enarson's polecam. His series of shots taken while standing on the rear platform  are a great souvenir for me!

He's ba-a-a-a-a-ack!...

After a couple of years of recovery, I finally got back to South Australia for what I believe was my 33rd great white shark expedition.

Ensconced in what Geri Tzimoulis unkindly called the Popemobile,

The Canadian photographer Mark Enarson came oin the trip with his polecam

Mark didn't even get his feet wet and shot some excellent portraits of me with my little friends:

From the cage, two sharks stood out from the seven in the bay. Big Bro was a good-sized male who spent one day making repeated passes

Note the ubiquitous Polecam in the right center below. many of Big Bro's sweeps ended with an attack on the cage

Sometimes giving us the tonsil view

Or even the dentist's-eye view

All in all, Big Bro was a Great Performer!

His pal Little Bro was, on the other hand, a snatch and grab shark, who appeared suddenly from the depths and snatched the bait in a flash

On one dive, Little Bro kept us all waiting for a half-hour, then erupted in a swift attack

More later, but that is a taste.

I'm ba-a-a-a-a-ack...

It's hard to have much more fun than this...

Arthur C. Clarke once said that the product of any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from--magic.

So, for a little magic, my panorama from above Hoover Dam was criss-crossed with all kinds of power lines.

What to do? With a bit of advice from Jack Drafahl, the Photoshop guru, I went to work with the latest release, Photoshop CS5. Look what its feature known as 'content-aware fill' was able to do...

Voila! Cables gone!

Looking down on a marvel...

On a beautiful, sunny day in Las Vegas, I took off for the Hoover Dam, to go up on the new bypass bridge. It is everything I hoped. These are a few early shots. Lots more work to do, but here's a hint:

Looking up from the visitor's center:

And here is what it is like to sit in God's Chair!!

Nice, eh?

Variations on a theme, of course. I guess you just had to be there--still, click on these to see larger versions!

Off to do some Photoshopping!!
By the way, Here's a quick video--that loud traffic noise isn't those vehicles you see at lower left, but the busy traffic on the bridge about ten feet behind me!

Squeezing the world into a photograph...

One of the satisfying parts of being home is having both the tools and the time to work on the enormous scenic vistas I saw around Moab.

I'm learning what kind of scenes work well, and which fight me all the way. This one is a natural. I'm in the middle of the Needles portion of Canyonland National Park, looking up at the Anticline and Needles Overlooks  Be sure to click on it to get the larger version. The second image is the view from up on the Needles Overlook

So, we know that those monster wide shots work when you stick 27 pictures together to make one.

However--there are other scenes that tend to show distortion when you do a lot of stitching.:

Little bit of curvature there, eh? Might still be usable, but I have to be careful.

If we are working on the printed page, we may have to stuff everything into one or more still pictures.  However, on the web we may be able to simply go to the video. This one is of the first big river bend leaving Moab on the 128. Here's the still:

And here is the scene on video.

Which means that different techniques have their place. However, when I can get a panorama to work, it is a thrill.