Diving

Buttons to the left get you to the various dives.

First, a few changes to my camera setup.

My Olympus 3030 is now 18 months old, and the CCD has a few bad pixels that are always white on the image and must be manually corrected in photoshop.

So I upgraded to the 4040 which has a few additional features I like:

	First the CCD now more pixels, so you get a 2272x1704 image instead of 2048x1536
	The camera offers a higher resolution mode where it uses the raw pixels to interpolate pseudo pixels prior to the jpg compression. This gives an effective image resolution of 3200x2400.
	The camera detects and maps out bad pixels. I don't how effective this feature is but it sounds better than mapping them out by hand in photoshop.
	The camera lets you bias the white balance towards blue or red as desired. When I went snorkeling without the strobe, I used a red bias or 1 or 2 tics to offset the red filtering from the water.
	When hooked up to the laptop, the camera is recognized as another hard drive and you don't need to run any special software to move or copy image files.

The only thing I miss is the Tetra's 3030 wide angle lens is not compatible with the 4040. That's another upgrade I'll have to make one of these days.

The other change with my setup was with the Nikon SB105 strobe bracket. I mistakenly did not break down the bracket after my last trip and the salt basically welded the strobe arm to the bottom bracket. Then I cracked the bottom bracket in several places when I tried to brute force it apart. It's still usable but I didn't want to take a chance on it falling apart when handing it to someone on the boat, so I now go sans bracket and use my left arm as an infinitely and instantly adjustable strobe arm. This worked very well.

OK, on to the dives...