香港 + 九州 trip

Tomorrow, we will off to Hong Kong & Kyshu ! This is not a diving trip, this is pay-off time (family vacation) since I went on live aboard alone in August! I look forward to consume plenty of fugu & soak in on-sen until my skin begins to peel!

Lately nothing exciting in Monterey, it's change of seasons, water has been rough and on top, the oil spill from San Francisco is not helping. Althogugh the oil spill seems minimal, it's going to affect marina life up and down the coast for a while.

While not much diving going on, I further attempt to improve my cooking creativity.
Here are a few results

It was between seasons & very bad visibiltiy yesterday in Monterey Breakwater, only better then last week because of no swell. I barely see my own feet. With only 5 ft visibility, I was hanging out by some rocks and look for critters. Wish the kelp not so distracting here. Beyond close up like this, there was no hope for any picture.

What a nasty day in Monterey ! Weather has been rough early in the week, system came from the North, rain and now Santa Ana from the East. But it was beautiful from home this morning, so I decided to head Monterey after checking the water condition showing a 10 ft swell ! Boy should I have stay home ! It was 1 of the worst sea condition I had seen in BreakWater. It's definitely a 12 ft swell or more and it went in a big cicrle ! Upon decent to 9 ft, I saw only about 1.5 to 2 ft and I was pulling in circles, went further down to 25 ft, same situation. After 25 min drifting in circle and no chance of taking any shot, I decide to go back. As much as I want to dive, I did but wasn't much fun ! Well until next weekend ....

Couple favorite from recent weekends in Monterey!

I have finally group my nudibranch collection into a flickr set, come take a look, hope you like it !

Tulamben album completed

Few of my favorites ...







Finally finished the Tulamben album !

Buy Nikon Capture NX !

Capture Peter Schulz's write up about Nikon NX on Digital Diver

The DP Review consensus is that NX produces the highest quality images but is slower than some other programs.

I own NX and Adobe CS2 and Bible plus I have tried a lot of others. As far as I'm concerned, NX can't be beat re image quality.

Try this. Shoot in RAW and JPEG at the same time. Then open the RAW image in NX and save it as a JPEG. When I do this the JPEGs are identical. Point being, I think the NX conversion engine is based on the same thinking that went into the Nikon camera conversion engine. Stated another way, I think Nikon knows their camera better than any other software company and has the luxury of applying this knowledge in NX with only the need to work for their cameras.

As for work flow, I open in NX and make my basic adjustments in NX. Then I save as a TIFF and open in Adobe CS2 for a few final adjustments e.g. Shadows and Highlights and sharpening.