Giles Shaxted

There is something just ball sack shrivelingly wrong with this sight !

IMG_2612 on Flickr – Photo Sharing.

2009 Our World Underwater Film Festival Presentation from Jason Heller on Vimeo. Via  Eric Cheng’s Journal.

I just got my copy and can’t wait to watch it !

It seems that Amazon.com is carrying shark fin soup through a third-party vendor, Pacific Rim Gourmet. With all the controversy surrounding shark fins and the horrible practices used to harvest fins, Amazon should be ashamed to be carrying shark fin soup and should rectify the problem immediately by pulling all shark fin products from their catalog.

What you can do:

1. Leave feedback at Amazon’s product page for Dragonfly Shark Fin Soup
2. Send e-mail to Pacific Rim Gourmet at customerservice@pacificrim-gourmet.com and write a letter of protest to:
   Pacific Rim Gourmet
   75-5660 Kopiko Street, Suite C7-210
   Kailua-Kona, HI 96740
3. Write to Amazon.com at Advantage Customer Service (advantage@amazon.com) and
   Investor Relations (ir@amazon.com)
4. Spread the word through your webpage, blog, etc.
5. Boycott Amazon.com until they comply
6. Join our discussion in the Wetpixel.com forums

[EDIT: Less than 48 hours later after a small bombardment from Wetpixelites and a few others I assume Amazon has made the product unavailable, however there are more out there selling to countries where it is illegal such as Asianfoods.com]
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I didn’t end up with any photos of interest from the coral spawning, however it was a great year for seeing it spawn. The organiser Stephen Broadbelt issued a press release with a group photo of all of us that were involved. I must say thank you to Ocean Frontiers for letting me be a part of it again (it was my third spawning). There are many people who don’t appreciate this sort of thing, and so miss out on special events under the water in the Cayman Islands .. I don’t choose to be a part of that group, I mostly only get in the water for special occasions now !!

So It’s quite rare that I actually go scuba diving, but I decided to take some time with buddy Alex to go take some photos and get myself in the swing of things again. It may even lead to doing it more regularly. Here are some photos from the day .. yes they are familiar .. as I wanted to take images to remind me how to do it !
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Gannet diving for Sardines.

finally got around to posting here about the sardine run. excuse the lameness i just had a hard drive failure and i’m pissed i haven’t backed up in a while. i won’t have lost much information bur it’s expensive now to buy a new hard drive and the get a proper back up system. anyways click to go see the rest of my photos at flickr.com. some people have even been asking if they can get some prints. if you are interested contact me and i will decide how to do it with the hi res images which are not online.

Feel free to leave comments or notes on my flickr account about any of the images you enjoy.

UPDATE: Hard drive failure of My Docments is going to cost me some headaches if they can’t repair it, or clone it. I do have a backup, but I will also loose some recent stuff. Please Clone work ! then I can cry from how much it costs !

and more images can be found here .. was experimenting with RAW and not sure my screen is set up right so colours look off to me a little but I don’t know what they are like

My Picture is on Diver Net right now and will be also in their Magazine in the UK Diver in the next few days.

All because I entered a Bsoup competition. It’s very pleasing to see one competition help your name and image get seen everywhere.

Maybe in a few US magazines too who knows. Thanks JP, for making the magazine stuff happen .. and thanks Alex for making the competition happen.

The competition was the first international I believe I had entered that at the least had some great people enter and was judged by a panel of people used to seeing amazing images. It was a purely digital contest I believe and either way was a great grin maker to see I did well in it.

I will have to get keen again and get in the water and shoot some more stuff very soon.

Alex has over the last year or so gotten me in the water during happy hour many times, even with the elements often being against us either through weather or dive shops closing. Todays day of diving is cancelled as we have a Norwester on our hands .. boo hoo.
Anyway .. our dusk dive last night was a very awesome dive, mostly due to Alex’s eyes but there was so much going on .. almost too much. We were in the water for fish spawning as normal, after the last few times of watching and learning their behaviour the process of photographing it became ever easier especially with the SLR capabilities of the D60. There were not many hamlets around, many Rock Beauty’s and also quite a few butterfly fish .. all of which have a very noticeable courtship process. Eden Rock the reef we were at had so many fish on it though that at first it seemed to be putting off some of the mating fish, however they soon became unaware and went about their business. The odd thing is for the first time of doing this dusk diving photography other fish were getting in the shot .. I’d often get a blurry blue chromis flying past in the background .. looks cool but takes away from the object of the photo. At the same time a very friendly turtle cam up to play and it is the second time I have touched a turtle and let me enhance this wording for you by saying rather the turtle touched me. Once in the east end a turtle came up and literally shook my hand .. a breath taking moment that was ruined by a moron of a diver who grabbed the turtle and started throwing it around. I won’t get into that story but there was some unpretty scenes afterwards between myself and him.
This turtle did exactly the same thing .. and I didn’t notice until looking through my view finder he was too close to photograph with my macro lense on.
The highlight of the dive for me though was the great shots of the hamlets I got followed by a wicked Flying Gunnard right as we were finishing up our safety stop before exit.
Mucho thanks of course goes out to Dave and Paul at Eden Rock for being good friends who comp us on our diving on a regular basis.