Redundancy and Routine
Safe Scuba Diving is about redundancy and routine.
On the redundancy front, not only do you learn backups and workarounds for the unlikely event of an equipment failure, but you also dive with a buddy, making some of your equipment quadrupally redundant.
On the routine front, the gear is assembled “just so.” A “buddy check” before you dive ensures that your gear has been scrutinized by two sets of eyes. During a recreational dive, you perform a 3 minute “safety stop” 5 meters below the surface to significantly reduce the chances of decompression sickness. And after the dive, the gear is also disassembled into a precise and well-thought-out configuration that readies it for the next dive.
My photography should perhaps be more like my scuba diving.
In Petra I used a lot of manual settings on the camera, including manual focus and modified ISO. On Day 1, I forgot that I was on manual focus and rendered dozens of shots out of focus. On Day 2, after a long-exposure shot at Petra By Night (below), I forgot I was at ISO 500, and many of my subsequent shots were unnecessarily grainy.
I was devastated at the time but now I see it as a hard lesson learned. I often don’t have time to check every single camera setting before firing off a shot, and so I tend to assume the camera is configured in a certain way. Neither ISO nor manual/auto focus is immediately obvious in the heads-up display in the D70s, and unlike in scuba, I don’t have a buddy to perform a “buddy check” before each shot. :)
So instead, I wonder if I should arrive at a configuration that I know I’m always going to leave my camera in when I turn it off. And stick to it. Or at the very least, arrive at a configuration for each shoot (desert, wedding banquet, pints in pub) and stick to it for the duration.
Does this resonate with any of the other photographers out there?
Diving the S.S. Thistlegorm
In May 1941, the British Merchant Navy freighter S.S. Thistlegorm left port at Glasgow and headed towards Alexandria, carrying a cargo of motorcycles, trucks, transport trailers, two light tanks, two steam engines, spare parts for airplanes and land vehicles, tires, rubber boots and more. Sailing back up through the Red Sea, with her anchor cast in the Strait of Gubal and waiting her turn to pass through the Suez Canal, the Thistlegorm was attacked by night by four German bombers who happened to sight the ship by chance. With her holds near the engine room struck by two bombs, the ship split in two and sank rapidly, but only nine men from her crew lost their lives, as the nearby HMS Carlisle came to the rescue.
The extraordinary wreck, sitting on a flat seabed at a little over 30 meters, was discovered by Jacques Cousteau in March of 1955, lost in 1957 and subsequently re-discovered by amateur divers. It is remarkably intact and complete with much of its cargo.
On the 16th, we travelled south to Sharm el Sheikh so we could visit the Thistlegorm and explore her over two memorable dives: one circumnavigating its perimeter, starting around the stern and heading towards the bow, and one dive into and through her holds and cabins.
The currents during our dive were the strongest I’d ever experienced, and I understand they can also be stronger. I was grateful for the drift dive training we’d received during the PADI Advanced course (even if, as fate would have it, our training “drift dive” went unexpectedly against the current.)
All of my photos from the wreck are now posted on Flickr. Here is a link to the whole set.
I have sad news: these are the last of my underwater photos from the trip. The Sealife DC500 camera failed during my second Thistlegorm dive (which is why I don’t have photos of some of the other incredible cargo, including Bren Carrier Mk II tanks sitting intact on the ocean floor).
The camera powered on underwater, but wouldn’t respond to any input, including the power button. By the time we got back to the boat, where I could power it down by removing the camera from the underwater housing and then removing its battery, the camera itself was very hot. And subsequently, every photo I took with the camera came out extremely overexposed (as in, almost entirely white). So something is definitely wrong with the camera, which is particularly disappointing because I was following all the precautions, including rinsing the underwater housing in freshwater after every dive, keeping it out of the direct sun, and inserting dessicant inside the housing to reduce humidity.
The good news, though, is that the camera’s video functionality continued to work after this incident, so it’s time for me to learn how to cut together a video from the clips I took during the rest of our dives!
Continue ReadingDoes you has lolcats? kthxbye.
I’m not really a cat person, honest. But there’s something about these “Lolcats” that makes me LOL.
If you’re uninitiated, or in need of a fix, visit icanhascheezburger and you can has a flavor.
Lolcat is a compound word that joins “lol” (“laugh out loud”) with “cat,” as in the tasty kitty pictured above. The idea is to take a photo of a cat (or cats) and superimpose a gramatically-butchered caption.
The Lolcat pidgin “grammar” is not random, though; it’s mutating (rapidly) and David McRaney’s piece on its origins and evolution introduces the most prominent memes and provides an analysis.
I find this linguistic mutation absolutely fascinating – and hilarious. I’m a jumble of contradictions: I refuse to contractions like “r u coming 2 the pub,” even in text messages, but I’m intrigued by how modern forms of written communication seem to be accelerating the mutation of human languages and the formation of new “dialects” like “1337speak” and this lolcat thing.
Computer languages have also evolved over the years to become (among other things) more efficient, or pragmatic, or domain-oriented. Or… absurd.
LOLCode is a programming language that uses the Lolcat syntax. Here’s “Hai World” in Lolcode:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYE
(edit: and I can’t resist, one more program showing a variable declaration and a loop:)
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
UP VAR!!1
VISIBLE VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE
(edit: There’s now a .NET compiler for LOLCode and a Microsoftie is going to present it at TechEd Australia!)
I’ve been laughing at Lolcats for a few weeks. I bring this up now because stray cats were everywhere in Dahab, using their charm and wits to abscond with as much food as possible. I hope I’ll get at least one Lolcat image out of their mugshots.
And if I wanted to take it to the next level, I’d make a Silverlight-based Lolcat generator akin to the LolBuildr.
kthxbye.
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