currently at: South Bight, Andros, Bahamas
current date: 6 May 2005

We've been getting quite a few emails asking about the photos we post, so I thought I'd just make a general log entry about our camera and photography.

We bought a new digital camera for this voyage: the Sony DSC-P150 "Cybershot" with the Marine Pack MPK-PHB underwater housing. Britt chose this camera because of the highly-rated digital cameras (from ratings on various web sites) this was the smallest, with the smallest underwater housing. Since nearly all our time in the water is snorkeling, rather than SCUBA diving, we wanted something that would not be heavy or obtrusive.

The photos we post to the web have been post-processed with Adobe Photoshop in order to correct the color balance (underwater photos in particular have a blue cast which can be lessened by doing "Auto Levels"). We also make them smaller (at 7.2 megapixels, the originals are HUGE) and sometimes crop them.

For the pictures which are posted as regular log entries, we use Flickr, a photo-sharing site that happens to have a nifty email blog interface for certain standard weblog programs, including the one we use, Blogger. We send an email message with a photo attached, and it gets automagically uploaded to our weblog. One limitation of this method is that the accompanying text is turned into html using a basic converter which can't be bypassed and which doesn't necessarily produce a pretty layout. (Our normal, non-photo entries, are composed in html, so I have more control over them.)  I can also only post one photo per mail message, and it's limited to 500x500 pixels.

The size limitation is not a big deal (no pun intended) because we have an even greater limitation - our bandwidth. We send and receive email while on the boat using Winlink, which is a rather remarkable system for email over high-frequency (HF) radio, put together and run by volunteer ham radio hobbyists. I use our marine HF radio (which can be tuned to the ham channels - I'm a licensed ham, call sign KG4EYP), connected to our computer via an HF modem. I send my mail to one of these volunteer stations, and their software automatically routes it to the internet; similarly, email that comes to us goes first to the Winlink hub, which then routes it to all the volunteer stations we use, and when I connect to one of those stations, it forwards me my internet email. It's great to be able to do email from the boat, but it's s-l-o-w. Anyone reading this remember the old 110 baud teletypes?  Well, if we've got good radio signal propagation, I might get as much as 300 baud - roughly three times the speed of those old teletypes. It's enough to make a dial-up connection seem blazing!

(This is a good spot for a reminder. If you would like to send us email, you must first go to http://www.winlink.org/accept and enter your email address. Our email address, windom [at-sign] windom.netrack.net, is forwarded to my Winlink address, but as they have a whitelist spam-control system, if you're not on the whitelist your email won't get through. Once we reply to your mail, you're in the system and don't have to do it again! But we love getting email, so please, drop us a line, if only to introduce yourself.

You can also just leave an anonymous comment on a log entry, and we'll get it. But we won't be able to reply unless you include your email address!)

Ok, back to the photos. With our eentsy weentsy bandwidth, it takes roughly five minutes to send 10 kilobytes. Each Winlink station has a daily connect limit of 30 minutes - plus, sending email takes significant power, and the longer it takes, the more power it uses. So I work pretty hard, cropping, resizing, and sometimes degrading the quality of the picture, in order to get them down under 20-25K.

We do keep higher-quality, larger versions for ourselves, though. So after we get back to the Land Of DSL, I'll go through and replace the tiny photos with bigger ones, hosted at our website rather than the Flickr site. Some of our best pictures look so bad when made small enough to send, that we haven't posted them - but we'll post them when we have real bandwidth. The camera also takes short movies, and we have made a few that we'll upload to the site then, as well. (For the real "virtual stowaway" experience!)  So that's incentive to keep reading even after we return to the US, I guess!

It's wonderful to have the capability to take underwater photos this year. Although we took lots of beach and island photos on our previous trips to the Bahamas, the true beauty of this country is underwater, and we are thrilled to be able to share what we see. Britt does nearly all of the underwater photography, which makes me happy because that means that I get to spear dinner. (He's such a good hunter that he can shoot a fish or two before I manage to hit one, which would mean that we'd already have enough, so I wouldn't get to do any hunting. Now I do most of the food hunting, and only whine to him that he needs to put the camera down and grab the spear if I'm having rotten luck.)

As far as photography technique goes, the same things that make Britt a great fish hunter make him a great fish photographer. It helps if you are able to hold your breath a long time, to descend smoothly, and to hang out underwater as motionless as possible. A lot of his best photos were taken when curious fish came closer to check him out.