Connecting Dots — Simply Connecting the Dots

No work, all play

October 03rd, 2006

Leaving Koln behind at 3pm on Thursday I made it back home at 2am on Friday. Germany sure does have a lot of standing traffic and Austria might as well close everything. Detours and waiting was the name of the game.

Woke up my brother, unpacked, repacked, ate breakfast and we were out of the house at 3am. 5 hours later we were waiting for a ferry in Split and about 24 hours after leaving Photokina I was underwater again.

The first dive was one I know very well by now. It’s an easy intro wreck dive that I’ve done at least a dozen times, not including freediving on it for almost ten years. But every time I find something different. It’s constantly deteriorating and new species find their way around it all the time.

Ribolovac

Third dive was very interesting. We went down alone, I made about a dozen photos of a nudibranch (Flabellina Ischitana or maybe Flabellina Affinis), moved on, made my way around a corner and there, bunched together in 2 square meters, were 6 big lobsters, each sitting on its ledge. I bring up my camera and on the LCD I see a: CHANGE BATTERY PACK… I thought the batteries would last more than 200 photos. Guess I was wrong A few minutes later and slightly higher we find another big specimen. This time a Scorpaena scrofa (scorpion fish). Not the tiny one you see quite often but a really BIG one. Batteries were still dead…

Flabellina Ischitana or maybe Flabellina Affinis

Discodoris atromaculata aka “the dalmatian”

Bonelia Viridis

Our final (fifth) dive before going home on the last sunday ferry out was also quite notable. A long swim out from a shore entry we found several rocks. The first hole we looked into was occupied by a large conger eel. Needless to say it was the biggest I’ve ever seen live. Returning back to shore we stumbled across a weird creature which was later identified only as sea hare (species so far undetermined). I’ve searched the entire directory on Sea Slugs forum but no positive match. Video can be found below. It truly is an interesting animal.

Conger Eel

Sea Hare (aplysia family)

more photos in the gallery

All work, no play (maybe a little)

October 03rd, 2006

Comments(0)

Photokina was great but I won’t be writing much about that. You’ll be able to read and see everything on e-Fotografija anyway. For now all I have for you is this… it was a bittersweet dissapointment on one hand and an exciting glimpse into the near future (and past) on the other.

We didn’t get all that we hoped for as far as cameras go but several companies served us some very interesting products to drool over. I’m actually tempted to switch to Pentax K10D with an assortment of their sweet pancake limited series lenses (21, 40, 70).
The Seitz 6×17 and Seitz Roundshot D3 were equally impressive.
Zeiss and Arri lenses….enough of that… it was drool fest whichever way you look at it. Leica M8 will probably be in every photographers wet dreams. It is, in every sense, a decent Leica M.

My mind keeps wandering over to the Visual Gallery (hall 1) and the amazing collection of photographs as well as rare photo books. I could spend days in there. As it happened I only had a few hours.

The other interesting aspect were all the new printers and papers that emerged in the past few years. Crane, Hahnemuehle, Innova, Bergger…. you really have to feel those papers to get it.

Enough, enough, enough… 4 days was nowhere near enough to really see the entire show. Sure, you could walk all over in a day but that’s hardly the point if you ask me.

We had some nice interviews… and a few bad ones. Hint: never talk to the marketing and PR department if you really want to walk away with stuff that you can’t read on the net. Always request the R&D geeks. Others atendees are optional.

I thought I said I won’t be talking much about Photokina? Full Stop.