The Daring Divers From Hell Present:
Sydney & Heron Island

The pictures were taken between January 13 and January 23, 2008. The trip was broken up into three parts, more-or-less: We started out in Sydney for a couple days, then went to Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef for a week. Then we returned to Sydney for a couple more days before returning home. For the most part, the pictures are in chronological order (at least for now.)

I'm experimenting with some different technology this time: I'm using PHP on the backend. It makes it easier to do some things, like add descriptive text to pictures. Plus, it was just an excuse for me to start learning PHP. But it's gonna take me AGES to add descriptive text to all the pictures. In some cases, I don't even know what underwater critters I took pictures of. So it will take some research. If anyone sees a picture without a caption (or the caption is wrong), please email me and let me know what the correct caption should be.

I have both still pictures and movies from the trip. To save disk space and hopefully make downloading easier, I have reformatted the movies from their original AVI format to Apple QuickTime MPEG4. I've tested the resulting movies under Windows using Media Player and under Linux using various players and they seem to work fine. But please let me know if you encounter problems viewing them.

At times visibility was very poor on this trip. That resulted in some -er- "less than optimal" pictures. Normally I would have never even put them up on the site, but unfortunately ALL the Manta Ray pictures looked totally craptacular. And they were so precious to me that I put them up even though they don't look good at all. I did, however, perform some digital enhancements on the worst of them to try and make them look a little better. I got the idea to try this from Sue Berry, who cleaned one up and emailed it back to me. Normally I wouldn't do this: I prefer to put the original images up so you can see the quality of my work, for better or worse.

Digital enhancement is, at best, an inexact science. What looks "best" is highly subjective. I played around with these pictures for many hours to come up with the versions you will see here. It's always a tradeoff. The enhancements I employed make the pictures look less "realistic", but they definitely make the subject of the picture show up much clearer. But what looks "better" to me might not look so good to you. If anyone cares to download any of these pictures and try it themselves, you are more than welcome to do so. I left the original pictures up: whenever I enhanced a picture, I put in a link so you could see the original and compare them.

That's about all I have to say. As always, enjoy the site. Questions, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Tim Bosserman
tim.bosserman@gmail.com

Updates:
02/18/2008: Added a page of movies.
02/17/2008: I digitally enhanced some of the crappier pictures (like the mantas.) You can view either the enhanced or original versions.
02/07/2008: Added / updated captions based on feedback from Jeff Thayer. Thanks a MILLION, Jeff!
02/06/2008: Initial site creation.