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.

Home is where the tools are...

Now that I'm home, I have my big computer, 16-bit color and plenty of memory to process huge panoramas. I shot a lot of them, so there is fun ahead!
This is a 27-picture panorama of The Wedge:

This one is along the Colorado River East of Moab, Utah. Look how deeply the river has carved the sandstone!

And below is a quick look at the San Rafael Swell, a gigantic barrier of stone you encounter when driving West on the I-70 out of Moab. It takes ten minutes at highway speed just to get up the hill to this point:

Stay tuned--there are a lot of Top-of-the-World scenes to come!

Home in one piece. I think.

Delighted to be home, though the drive across Utah today was spectacular. The weather broke at a crucial moment, and I got some good shots I haven't processed yet.

For a treat, though, how about some flying lawnmower videos? This was the one morning when the Sun really came out, and there were lawnmowers everywhere!

That fabulous scene may have you wondering--but what the heck do you do after two or three hours when you want to land? It turns out that gusty winds really blow these things around, and landing them is an art.

The experienced pilots make it look easy, but after watching some students make several unsuccessful attempts, I have a great respect for these men.

60 Gigabytes of data to process, but I look forward to every one!

Playing Texas Dodgem with the Cloud gods...

I awakened this morning to--surprise!-clouds. Looking for any break in the overcast, I went out to Gold Bar on the Potash Road. Took some videos of the flying lawnmower drivers. They were in from Salt Lake City, and left after a quick flight. They call what they do Powered Parachuting or Flying Gocarts. Whatever.
That image of the river bend at Gold Bar above is taken from the trail I hiked to Corona Arch. It is a mile and a half hike to reach the arch formation, and there is a 440 foot climb--each way.  Just kidding. I think.

As we approach the formation we see a Halo Arch in that big hole, and the huge Corona Arch over to the right:

The Halo Arch is a horizontal opening to the sky:

Then you walk through the Corona Arch to shoot the Sun side. Note how tiny the people look.:

Then I saw what looked like blue sky out route 128 to the East. So, I took off to take some pictures of the colossal canyons cut by the relentless Colorado. This is near Big Bend::

This shot above is from just a mile further East from Big Bend. A couple of miles past that there is a turn where we see the enormous Butte known as The Castle near Castle Valley. That is it, directly behind the river.

If you look back through the last few posts, you see that despite the weather's effect, Moab is one of the most scenic places in the country.

Since the weather looks bad tomorrow as well, I'm expecting to drive home. Another adventure!

Sigh. Take what the mountain gives you...

The weather was pretty horrible yesterday, but this morning there were beginning to be patches of blue sky.

I headed for one out the Potash Road--and look what I found! Flying lawnmowers!

did you catch the TWO in the air behind the one taking off? It wasn't a bad spot for flying:

As it got clearer, I went to the Eastern leg of the Colorado on Rt. 128. How do you make a Grand canyon? With a BIG river It was raining again, of course. I left the shadow thrown by the umbrella in the shot, just for fun....

When I got my courage up, I drove up into the Manti-LaSals.

Oh--did I mention the snow? Up here it was all snow and slush--and nobody to rescue you if you got stuck. Still, it gives you a remarkable view.

Brrrrrr!  And me in shorts!

All worth it, though. the sky cleared just enough to see the summit:

Oh--did I mention the bear cub playing in the road? It scrambled away when it saw me come around a corner, and scampered up an embankment into the trees.
There is a high overlook above the valley where I took all those yellow birches and aspens in the rain yesterday. That is the road down there. The deep grove to the right is the birches, and the yellow trees in the center are the ones dropping all their leaves on the road. What a view! Even the snow on the summit peeks through!

All in all, a wonderful day. The Cloud God kept throwing big wet ones my way, but I dodged and weaved as best I could.

Singin' in the Rain...

This is the kind of day that requires invoking my idol Winston Churchill: Never give in....Never give in...Never give in...

I can't remember the last time I had to shoot pictures from under an umbrella. The subject matter has to be pretty interesting. 

This is a magic week, despite the rain. the aspens and birches are in full Fall change. These are East of Moab near the Dewey Bridge. Notice in several of these pictures that some leaves are still green, while others have begun their color change cycle.
This next image is from the same spot, but turning to look across the river:

Since the leaves as shwn here are early in their cycle, I'm going to pull a Churchill and stay here 'til the Sun comes out. After all, how many times do you see this?

 Of course, this is a game the trees don't win. In the end, those lovely leaves will lie everywhere:

And don't think there aren't other colors!

The trees are changing everywhere, not just in the Manti-LaSal mountains. This is the small town of Castle Valley. Makes one understand why the Mormons ended their westward trek in Utah. Even the low clouds and rain can't diminish the beauty of this valley.

  So--like Churchill, I shall persevere here in Moab until the Sun lights all of this scenery.