I’ve been meaning to do this for ages but I finally got around to it. I can now add SmugMug Galleries to Wordpress which can then also be viewed with either Lightbox or PicLens. Ive been prompted to finally finish this by my friend Eric Cheng, who added this to his blog recently as well.

Here is a gallery I created at SmugMug’s request a few months ago »»»»

“We’ve been in the water for about an hour now. There’s about a dozen Lemon sharks circling around us. Suddenly Julie points into the distance and I quickly swirl my head that way. There is no mistaking the shape,size and pattern, here’s comes our first Tiger shark. Immediately the attitude of the divers changes; while you can basically ignore the Lemon sharks, you can not ignore the Tiger. It’s great to be back!”

Read the rest, with some pretty sad events, in our tripreport.

You never know what to expect when you dive. During a dive in Indonesia I suddenly saw a sponge spawning. The event only lasted for a few minutes, but I was able to capture some images. It was the first time I ever saw this with my own eyes.

It’s always nice to win a prize in a competition. We don’t enter that many, actually only two this year, but you always hope one of your images will do well. One of the honors I hadn’t received yet was a Best of Show, until now. I got the BoS at the Underwater Images competition.

The image is of a Lizardfish being cleaned by a small goby taken in the US Virgin Islands. It was a coincidence that I even took the image. We had entered the water to take photos of mating hamlets at dusk. On our way to the spot where we had seen Hamlets we crossed some coral heads, and on one of them I noticed a Lizardfish with its mouth open. At first I figured I was too late, but as I got closer it just stayed there. For the next 15 minutes the goby kept coming back to clean this Lizardfish, and I got quite a few shots. Eventually it became too dark and I stopped, but it was a very cool experience.

I put two new articles online (dutch only) from Duiken Magazine. I wrote these articles in the end of 2007 and Duiken allows me to put the pdf’s online after a few months, which is very nice of them. They even provide me with the published pdf files. I wish all magazines would do that!

You can read the articles about Dragonets and the Banda Sea in our Publications section.

Julie and I have been pretty active in the last few years on Wetpixel, one of the best underwater photography sites. We are both staff members now, and help out where we can in running the site.

Eric Cheng, the founder of Wetpixel has recently started a magazine called “Wetpixel Quarterly. The second issue remembers the amazing photography of the legendary Jim Watt, who passed away way too early. It also contains portfolio’s of most of wetpixel staff members, including Julie and myself. We’re obviously very proud to be in such a quality publication.

If you’re interested in a subscription visit the Wetpixel Quarterly website.

In September/October of 2007 Julie and I went to Indonesia on a long trip through the Banda Sea. We visited some very remote islands, some of which have a very notorious history. Especially the Banda Islands themselves were fascinating. These islands are known as the spice islands, and many sea battles were fought over its riches in the 16/17/18th century.

I wrote a 4 page story about the trip which can be read in Duiken Magazine, and will be available as a pdf in a few weeks with this article.

What is even cooler is that Julie got the cover of the January issue with a nice image of 2 boys coming to pose underwater.

Every year Julie and I go to the Virgin Islands for about three months to visit Julie’s mother. Unfortunately it’s really warm there as well, while here in Amsterdam it’s cold, rainy and gloomy. But we’ll just have to sacrifice ourselves. We’ll be on the island of St Croix, which is by far the nicest of the US Virgin Islands. Ok, maybe St John is nicer, but just too small for us.

We normally do some diving there, but last year we actually got into horse riding as well. We know a local cowboy there who we helped out taking care of about 15 horses. We had a blast, so hopefully we can do that again this year. We started to take more advanced riding lessons here in Amsterdam just for that occasion.

VI, see you in January!

We had so much fun in the Bahamas diving with Tiger sharks and Dolphins that we decided to go again. Julie actually decided to go two trips, because she wants to try the Oceanic Whitetips as well. What she really means is that she wants to take photos of the wild pigs they found last year, that would come out to the waters edge so you can take split shots. Not my thing. So for the first time in, well, forever, we’re not going on a dive trip together. I’ll meet up with her for the second trip which is the Tiger Sharks trip. Can’t wait, we had so much fun last time.

These Lemon Sharks are always getting in the way of your Tiger Shark shots!

We just put a new gallery online containing some of our Solomon Islands images. You can see this gallery here.

It’s the holy grail for many underwater photographers, a prize at Antibes. This year has only been the second year we have entered it, but never did we think either of us would win a price. The best of the best enter this contest. It came as a very unexpected, but pleasant, surprise that Julie won a prize in the portfolio section. Officially named “PRIX APNEA - Meilleure image d’apnée”, I suppose it could be translated as ‘best image of a free diver’. This same image has been a cover for ‘Australasian Scuba Diver’ magazine as well, so it’s been a successful image for Julie. Congrats!

We recently came back from three dive trips to the Solomon islands for a total of 30 days of diving. The second trip was a wetpixel trip organized by Eric Cheng. Julie and I are moderators of wetpixel, so it was really nice to meet Eric and several other wetpixel people again. We’ve had the tripreport of the wetpixel trip online for a while, but I just put the other 2 reports online.

• Trip 1, with 11 people.
• Trip 2, the wetpixel trip
• Trip 3, with only 7 people

We just finished up the Wetpixel trip to the Solomon Islands. It was a really nice trip with a great group of people. We had some beginning shooters, but most people were pretty advanced photographers. We all had a blast, and not a day went by without some small prank, joke, or otherwise hilarious event. For more about the trip check out our tripreport.

Julie and I just returned from the Bahamas trip with Eric Cheng. We had an amazing time diving with Tiger Sharks, countless Lemon Sharks, and Dolphins. Read our trip report of this trip. I also added two trip reports of our previous trips to Indonesia visiting Raja Ampat and Komodo.

I’ve written a review before about the StiX arm system for underwater photography. The creator of that system, John Zeiss, is a great guy that really listens to suggestions. Several people have asked if he can make his buoyancy floats in black instead of white. So of course he did.

You may be wondering why anyone would care, are we that fashion conscious? The reason for black floats is that white floats look a lot like tasty little fishy morsels to a hungry shark. If you’re doing a trip like we’re doing with Tiger Sharks you really want dark floats.