LAUPS: The Los Angeles Underwater Photographic Society
Founded 1957 - Celebrating 50 years of underwater photography

This year the Long Beach Scuba Show and Wetpixel are hosting an underwater photo competition.

Under the Blue Photo Competition

Come on, LAUPS members, get out your best images and enter! Winning images will be announced and exhibited at the show! Imagine how you'd feel if someone from the other side of the world (or worse, Orange County!) won a comp right here in our own backyard!

Deadline for entries is May 12.

From the website:

Next in the series of Underwater Competition.com underwater imagery events, and on the heels of the popular Our World Underwater & DEEP Indonesia competitions, Wetpixel, DivePhotoGuide and the 2007 SCUBA Show are proud to bring you “UNDER THE BLUE 2007”.

Photographers will compete in four still image categories, including a category for images that focus on California’s unique and beautiful underwater environment, and one video category. Winners will share in more than $20,000 in prizes, including premium dive travel, underwater photography and diving equipment! Travel prizes include trips to some of the top photo destinations in the world including Fiji, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and Australia.

2007 CATEGORIES
1. Majesty of the Oceans
2. The Macro World
3. Man & the Sea
4. California Underwater
5. Video

15% of entry proceeds will be donated to marine conservation efforts.


What's your carbon impact? The Nature Conservancy has launched an online Carbon Calculator. The long flights we make for dive travel sure add up. My filghts - mostly business travel, unfortunately - push me from 18 tons of CO2 a year, below the national average of 27 tons, up to 72 tons a year. Time to think about offsetting this.

There is another carbon calculator, with a donation tool, The Conservancy Fund's Go Carbon Zero Page. They calculate the donation that will take you down to zero impact, and it's not much, the cost of a cocktail or coffee or so, per round trip.

Delta Airlines is offering customers the chance to offset the carbon emissions from their flights by donating to the Conservation Fund, they will kick it off with donations for passengers on Earth Day and all their employees.

No need to wait for your airline to do it, though, you can start doing it yourself with The Nature Conservancy, The Conservancy Fund, or many other organizations. Put $5 in a jar every time you fly, and send it in at the end of the year.

From the Delta Press Release:

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 18, 2007 – Delta Air Lines is partnering with The Conservation Fund, a leading environmental nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting land and water resources, to become the first U.S. airline to help its customers give back to the environment by buying trees to help offset carbon emissions associated with air travel. To kick off the program, Delta is making a donation to The Conservation Fund for every customer taking a Delta mainline or Delta Shuttle flight on Earth Day, April 22, and is pledging a commitment to plant a tree for each of the airline’s 47,000 employees.

Beginning June 1, customers who purchase a ticket online at delta.com will have the option to contribute toward the offset of carbon emissions associated with air travel through a donation to The Conservation Fund. Contributions of $5.50 for a domestic roundtrip flight and $11 for an international roundtrip flight will be used by The Conservation Fund to plant trees throughout the U.S. and abroad. A small portion of the donation also supports the organization’s education and outreach efforts.

The turtles are well on their way, many are out past Cocos Island. Take a look at their progress at The Great Turtle Race.

PhotoRescue has been updated to version 3.0.

PhotoRescue is an advanced data-recovery solution for digital photography media. Whether you have erased your pictures or formatted your card by mistake, or you have experienced a crash, PhotoRescue may help.

PhotoRescue V3

The Online Photographer has nominated the logo at left for those who want to identify themselves as film shooters on their websites.

The I-Use-Film-Ribbon

We've got a club meeting this Wednesday!

Speaker is Chuck Berman, on Digital Workflow. His Bio is below.

Minicomp theme is "A Face Only a Mother Could Love". Send your entries in or bring them with you.

Filenames should be:

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Enjoy the meeting!



Chuck Behrman Bio

Chuck Behrman has spent more than 30 years in professional photography including more than 10 years utilizing digital imaging techniques. Chuck’s engineering background enables him to creatively blend highly technical as well as artistic attributes into his images.

C.H. Behrman Photography produces images for advertising and business purposes as well as fine art photographic prints for home and business décor.

Although he is currently exclusively using digital photography, many of Chuck’s fine art images were originally captured with film.

Chuck uses various processes for his images; including archival pigment giclée for color images and carbon pigment Piezography for grayscale images. All images are produced on 100% cotton fine art papers to insure an archival print lifespan of the maximum attainable with current technology.

In addition to principal photography, Chuck currently consults and coaches one-on-one and teaches very interactive workshops and classes for professional and serious amateur photographers. These address intermediate and advanced Photoshop techniques relating to fine art, commercial and portrait photography and have been presented in such venues in addition to his studio as San Luis Obispo Art Center, The MacGathering, Professional Photographers of Los Angeles, etc.

Chuck has authored several comprehensive tutorial CD’s, each containing up to 5 ½ hours of screen captured video to coincide with the topics of the workshops and classes.

www.chbphoto.com: Advertising Photography, Workshops, Tutorial CDs, Consulting & Coaching

www.fhoto-art.com: Fine Art Photography

X-RAY MAG is an international dive magazine. It is complimentary and published in pdf-format and distributed worldwide over the internet every other month.

Index of X-Ray 16:

PHILIPPINES - Diving the Visayas.
AMBON - the spice islands in Indonesia.
Protecting the Sharks: Wolfgang Leander + Rob Stewart/Sharkwater movie.
Divemedicine: Why antioxidants protects divers.
NEW Zealand - land of the Kiwis.
Rebreathers: Comfort and Efficiency.
WHY shoot video.
SPRING DIVE Fashion.
Science: The Black Sea.
New Equipment.
Report from Moscow.

X-Ray Mag

For the first time ever, researchers have electronically tagged sperm whales and jumbo squid swimming together off Mexico's Pacific Coast to learn more about how the giant creatures hunt and feed.

It's probably the only time tracking devices have been applied simultaneously in the same waters to deep-diving predators and their prey.

Nat Geo: Jumbo Squid, Sperm Whale Study Reveals How the Giant Creatures Feed, Hunt

The 31st annual Beneath the Sea show kicked off this weekend to another bustling and energetic crowd.

As always, DivePhotoGuide was there to cover the show from a photographers and videographers perspective. The DPG booth was the place to be for underwater imagery. One of the "cooler" elements of our booth was a converted old Nikonos V turned mystical fountain. Now that's art!

Tour of Beneath The Sea 2007

Since 2000, scientists at the PIER have been performing an involved study of the movements of the giant sea bass, Stereolepis gigas, in the California Channel Islands. This is the first intensive study of the behavior, movements and habitat usage of the giant sea bass.

Studying the Behavior and Habitat Preferences of Giant Sea Bass (Stereolepis gigas)

RANONGGA, Solomon Islands (AFP) - The seismic jolt that unleashed the deadly Solomons tsunami this week lifted an entire island metres out of the sea, destroying some of the world's most pristine coral reefs.

In an instant, the grinding of the Earth's tectonic plates in the 8.0 magnitude earthquake Monday forced the island of Ranongga up three metres (10 foot).

Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba divers from around the globe lie exposed and dying after the quake raised the mountainous landmass, which is 32-kilometres (20-miles) long and 8-kilometres (5-miles) wide

Yahoo News: Quake lifts Solomons Islands out of the Sea

Map of the area from http://www.world-of-islands.com

Submit your films to the San Diego UnderSea Film Exhibition, And Make a Difference!

This is a call for entries for the 8th Annual San Diego UnderSea Film Exhibition, scheduled for Friday and Saturday evenings,
October 12th & 13th, 2007 at the Qualcomm Hall located at 5775 Morehouse Dr, San Diego, Ca. 92121

Here is your chance to see your work projected in Standard or High Definition formats in a state of the art venue on a giant screen. There is no entry fee! Each evening will feature a different program consisting of 14 to 16 short underwater films from locations all over the world.

* Submission deadline is August 15, 2007.

* For further information on UFEX see our website, www.sdufex.com

The Luminous Landscape website and photographer Michael Reichmann recently led a photo trip to Antartica. See the gallery here, and take a look at an interesting essay on what worked and what didn't on a trip that was tough on a lot of cameras.

The Luminous Landscape: Antartica 2007 Portfolio

The Luminous Landscape: Antartica 2007: What worked, what didn't

For more than 100 million years, leatherback turtles have graced our oceans. At an astonishing eight feet long and up to 2,000 pounds, they journey between continents and dive to incredible depths. But in the last 10 years, 95% of the leatherbacks in the Pacific Ocean have vanished, victims of human pressures.

The Leatherback Trust, Tagging of Pacific Predators, Conservation International, Costa Rica's Ministry of Environment and Energy, and Yahoo! invite you to join the Great Turtle Race. Follow 11 leatherback turtles on a two-week journey as they swim from their nesting sites on Playa Grande beach in Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands.

The Great Turtle Race

We'd like to welcome a new LAUPS sponsor, Weldon Color Lab.

See the Weldon Difference yourself!

LightJet prints from digital files on Fuji Crystal Archive or Ilfochrome paper.
Drum scans and flatbed scans.
Mounting, finishing, and custom backlit display prints.

Weldon Color Lab
8945 Exposition Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
888.893.5366

Weldon Color Lab

From the Orange County Register:

Bald eagle chicks a Catalina surpise.

Chicks hatch on their own, likely for the first time in more than 50 years.

A pair of bald eagles nesting on Santa Catalina Island have hatched chicks without human help - the first time that's known to have happened since the mid-1940s.

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1639657.php

OC Register: Bald eagle chicks a Catalina surpise