How to Win a One-Day Photo Contest
Monte Smith

As a survivor of over a dozen Beach Dive and Shootout contests, I've learned a few things that might help you in your efforts to compete well and win. I won't concentrate on the aspects of competition having to do solely with photography … I'll assume you have some skill. Instead, I'll talk about maximizing your chances of taking the best pictures you can, given your skill level. These photo contests are about getting the most benefit out of a lot of seemingly small advantages. Doing a lot of small things correctly can move you out of the pack into the top tier consistently, contest after contest. I try to do the best job I can and leave the rest up to the judges. There is so much variation in judging that you will may not be able to tell why one picture wins over another. However, you can get onto the short list consistently if you play your cards right. A single day competition usually involves shooting a single roll of film. Since most of us normally shoot an entire 36 exposure roll on every dive, we will be conserving film so that we can shoot on more than one dive. This feels like an unnatural act for me. However, instead of liberally shooting every photo opportunity, I force myself to meter my film consumption throughout two or three dives. Beyond that, here are some specific things you can do to increase your chances:

1. Have a plan. Know where you are going to dive, what you plan to shoot, when you need to be in the water, and when you need to be out. If unpredictable dive conditions cause you to change your plan, you will need a backup plan. This is difficult to do, but important.
2. Make your dive boat and hotel accommodations early.
3. Pre-dive your plan on the previous weekend just as you want to do it on the competition day. Note the time it takes. Note the location of likely subjects. They might still be there on competition day.
4. Test the film you will be using on competition day. In addition to taking pictures underwater with it, try a roll in your backyard. Use a MacBeth Color chart to determine the exposure characteristics of the film. Does it work better slightly underexposed or overexposed? How much latitude does it have?
5. If you are using a housing, water test it before you put the camera inside. You can do this in a pool or hung off a line from a boat or dock. Do it before competition day. A shallow test of five to fifteen feet will find most leaks.
6. Make sure your dive gear is in good shape. This is not the time to have a stuck regulator or a leaky dry suit.
7. Have enough tanks ready to dive the day. Waiting for a refill may not fit the plan. Make sure the tanks are filled to the max when cold. Ten percent less air is ten percent less bottom time.
8. If all other things are equal, dive shallow. You want to increase the time you can spend finding subjects and taking pictures. An hour and ten minutes at twenty-five feet will be better than twenty minutes at one hundred feet.
9. Beware of the herd mentality. If you are on a dive boat with a lot of other photographers, will there be divers in your wide-angle pictures when you don't want them there? Will shy animals disappear because of all the activity?
10. What are the tides doing? Tides that are going out tend to muck up the visibility. Incoming tides tend to bring in clearer water. On some days, it won't matter because you won't care about the difference between the one-foot viz on the outgoing tide and the one-and-a-half foot viz on the incoming tide.
11. Make sure each and every battery in your camera, strobes and light is a good one.
12. Test your strobes for firing reliability. Do it before you put film in the camera. You don't want to burn off usable slides on this test.
13. Assemble your camera gear before dive day. You want to do it right. Take your time. Inspect the O-rings. Assemble carefully. Avoid doing it on competition morning. You will be tired, and maybe half asleep.
14. Dive with a buddy you have dived with before. Don't try a new one out on this day. You don't want to spend time baby-sitting someone you "thought" was a good diver.
15. When loading film in the camera, double-check film advancement after closing the film back. You will avoid shooting thirty-six "blanks".
16. Most important: remember that great pictures are "made" rather than "taken". You will make better pictures if you can see what you want to shoot in your mind's eye before you get in the water. You will be better off visualizing what you want to shoot in advance than waiting to get underwater before hunting down anything that happens to move in front of your lens.
17. Decide in advance how many frames you want to shoot of each competitive category you plan to enter. You will probably not stay to your guideline exactly, but with no advance planning, you may blow too many shots on one subject.
18. If you are a novice, you may want to limit your category participation. You will increase your chances by entering one or two categories rather than four or five. Bracketing more shots of the same subject will often produce a winner.
19. Remove the lens cap from the lens before putting the camera in the housing. If you forget this pointer, make sure Chuck Tribolet is not around to see it, or you will get a Black Lens Cap Award for certain! (Chuck says: I'll find out anyway, and I use a hotter fire to roast divers who don't tell me their side of the story.)

I hope you can use some of these tips to help you. These competitions are very useful because they force you to take the very best pictures you can on one roll. It's the opposite of what we normally do … take thousands of pictures and show only the best few. Sure, it yields great results, but it is a volume game. Shooting your best roll really shows what you have accomplished in mastering your photography.

- NCUPS Newsletter 12/98

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Making Title Slides

The key is using the right software. You can make title slides using a raster graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, or any of several others, but once you add text, it's no longer text, it's an image. Each time you rescale it, it looses quality. If you misspell something, you'll probably have to retype the whole thing.

The right software is a presentation graphics (a.k.a. vector graphics) program such as Lotus Freelance, Corel Draw, or Microsoft PowerPoint. These program remember text as TEXT, and when you rescale, it is redrawn from scratch so there's no loss of quality, you can edit single characters, and, maybe most importantly, you can spell check it. These programs come with many pretty formats so you don't have to invent your own, and lots of cute clip art.

Photoshop users will probably be aware that Photoshop 5 (just out) has a text layer that remembers text as text, but it doesn't have all the nice formats and clip art.

Now that you have selected a program, what should the slides look like?

Firstly, the overall style is important. Avoid fine detail, your audience probably won't be able to read it anyway. Use bold colors with good contrast. Keep it simple. You are providing an outline, not the whole book. The first slide should have the title of the show and your name. Who knows, maybe the photo editor of the National Geographic will be in the audience. Maps are a good idea. Most modern Americans are poor at geography and a map will give them some idea of where you went. The presentation graphics programs will come with a set of maps as clip art. Someone will always want to know what sort of equipment you used. A slide talking about your equipment will put that question to rest right away.

OK, now that you've gotten your title slides into the computer, how to get them back out?

The highest quality method is to have an imaging service bureau (most pro photo labs such as Faulkner's in San Francisco or Calypso in Santa Clara have a imaging branch now) write them on a film recorder. This typically done at a 4096 x 2730 resolution. The pixels are invisible under a loupe. But this costs about $10 a slide and takes a day or two. Lately, I've been just photographing my monitor. I have a 1600 x 1280 x 16M colors display, which is higher resolution than most. The individual pixels are not visible under a loupe, but you can see some very slight staircasing of diagonal lines. This is not visible when the slide is projected. If you have a 1280 x 1024 display, the results won't be as good, but will probably be tolerable. At 1024 x 768 and below, it's going to look like a picture of a computer monitor.

There are four key considerations when photographing a computer monitor:

1. Use a long exposure. The monitor is painted from top to bottom every 1/60 of a second or so. But a given pixel on the screen energized by the electron beam for only about 1/100,000,000 of a second! It glows very brightly during that time, then rapidly fades away. Your eye does a fine job of averaging this so you don't see it, but film doesn't unless you use a long enough exposure to catch many sweeps. If you use a short exposure you will get a bright horizontal band in the area that got one extra sweep during the exposure. You need to catch enough sweeps that one more sweep isn't noticeable. I've found that the sweeps don't really disappear until I get to exposures longer than 1/4 second (fifteen sweeps).
   
2. Make sure the camera is absolutely square to the face of the monitor. If it isn't dead square, things will look trapezoidal. I put a carpenter's torpedo level on top of the monitor to level it left to right, and then put it against the front face of the bezel to get the face vertical, then check the top again. I then put the camera on a tripod and level the camera with a bubble level that snaps into the hot shoe. The next step is to set up the camera so the center of the lens is the same height as the center of the screen. Then I display a pattern of concentric rectangles, and jockey the tripod left and right and in and out (it SHOULD already be the right height) until the rectangles are parallel to the edges of the image in the view finder, and the image just fills the viewfinder.
   
3. Make sure nothing is reflected in the monitor. If it is, it will show in the slides. I shoot title slides in my darkroom, so there are no light sources to be reflected, and I wear a black T-shirt so I'm not reflected. Watch out for the monitor being reflected in something shiny behind you.
   
4. Park the blasted cursor out of sight. This has been the cause of more reshoots for me than anything else. That's the hard part. The rest is just photography. I autofocus on a pattern in the middle of the screen, then switch manual focus but don't touch the focus again. This keeps the camera from hunting if there's no detail in the middle of an image and focuses better than my eyes can. I use a 60 mm macro lens, Kodak E100S film, and 0.8 seconds with the LENS set to f/8. You will be close enough that the mechanical setting of f/8 actually be more like f/11 because of the extension, and your camera may tell you that. You will need to bracket to figure out the correct exposure, but if you record the monitor brightness and contrast settings, you should be able to reproduce the setup, and once dialed in, no more bracketing will be required. It takes me about a half hour to get everything aligned perfectly, then I can bang off a couple of dozen title slides in a couple of minutes.

- NCUPS Newsletter 9/98

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Twenty-Five Ways to Flood Your Camera

I've only got my tongue lightly planted in my cheek as I write this. Most of these mistakes have happened, or nearly happened, to me or to someone I know. Names are withheld to protect the guilty.

1. "Hurry up honey, you should have done that last night. The dive boat leaves in fifteen minutes."
   
2. Pet fur (my personal demon).
   
3. Not inspecting o-rings before closing the back or installing the lens/port. Do it EVERY time.
   
4. Not inspecting o-rings TWICE before closing the back or installing the lens/port. Do it EVERY time.
   
5. Not wearing your reading glasses while inspecting o-rings. Those under forty are exempt. For a while.
   
6. Sand on the o-rings.
   
7. Leaving the o-rings out.
   
8. Leaving the storage o-rings in.
   
9. Forgetting to connect the strobe cord.
   
10. Not checking that the strobe connections are tight before each dive.
    
11. Not getting annual services done. Annual means "same time, every year," not "some time, some years." If your maintenance shop seems to think it means "we have a year to get it done", find another shop.
    
12. Arguing with the airline on the telephone while doing o-ring maintenance.
13. Being distracted while doing o-ring maintenance.
    
14. Setting up the camera in the parking lot. Do it at home.
    
15. Setting up the camera on the dive boat. Do it at home.
    
16. Beer before o-rings. First o-rings, then beer.
    
17. Using the latch to close the back. Close the back with your fingers, THEN latch it.
    
18. Cotton swabs. They are a fine device for applying cotton fibres to o-ring grooves. Instead use foam swabs from Radio Shack.
    
19. Too much grease.
    
20. No grease.
    
21. Wrong grease. Use Nikon grease on Nikon o-rings, Ikelite grease on Ike's o-rings, and so forth. All greases are not the same. They are matched to the vendor's o-ring material. Some greases will melt some o-rings. Why take a chance?
    
22. Changing lenses underwater.
    
23. Using sharp tools like dental picks to remove the o-rings.
    
24. Cutting the o-rings on the lens' bayonet mount.
    
25. Finally, o-ring maintenance is something you do after a dive, not before the next. That way you are never rushed, and the camera is all set up when the whale shark swims by. Set up for macro of course, but set up none the less.

- NCUPS Newsletter 9/98

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Hey, Noah! More Ways to Flood a Camera

Chuck Tribolet

In the September issue, I wrote an article titled "Twenty Ways to Flood Your Camera." Here's a lucky thirteen more. These have happened, or nearly happened, to me or someone I know.

• Hotel sinks and tubs. I've no idea what it is about hotel bathrooms. Maybe the little bottles of shampoo are really aliens that eat o-rings.

• Beach dives - sand gets on the O-ring.

• Beach dives - entry and exit are a risk

• Thinking "It can't happen to me."

• Not washing your hands before servicing O-rings. Washing your hands removes hairs, skin dander, dirt, and all manner of evil things.

• Not doing a serious soak and O-ring service when you get home from a tropical trip. Tropical "fresh" water is often a bit brackish and a re-soak in known clean water at home will fix that. An O-ring service immediately thereafter dries things out before storage.

• Hanging your camera at the same depth as your hang tank. The camera is the clapper and the tank is the bell. Ding, dong, the 15 mm is flooded.

• Tag line too short and the camera gets banged on the side of the boat or kicked by a diver.

• Floods run in pairs. If you flood one camera, figure out what happened before you take the other one in the water. Then figure out WHY you did that, and double check the second camera for different flavors of the same mistake.

• Doing all but one part of an o-ring service, thinking "I'll put that last O-ring in on the boat." If you MUST do something like this, do something equivalent to the red "remove before flight" ribbons used to lock the controls on airplanes so you don't take the camera in without finishing the service.

• Letting ANYONE mess with the camera out of your presence. I know one person who got his new housing all set up with the help of the technician, and left the room while the technician packed things up -- and carefully removed the main o-ring so it would not be stored under pressure. The housing went straight into the pool, and filled with water.

• Being distracted by pain. In fact, being distracted by anything is the surest path to a flood.

• Not wearing a hat. A hat will help keep hair and water drops away.

- NCUPS Newsletter 12/98

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Better Sync Cord Caps

The plastic caps that come with Nikon synch cords fit tightly enough that in time they will flatten the O-rings. A non-flatttening cap can be made from a Fuji film canister as follows:

1. For the cap at the strobe end, drill a 3/8" hole in the center of the cap. For the cap at the camera end, use a sharp knife to carefully trim away the raised center section of the cap and the vertical walls that support it, leaving a hole about 1/2" in diameter. With a sharp knife, make a radial cut from the new hole to the outside of the cap.Slip the cap over the cord (strobe end) or over the shaft of the plug between the nut and the cord (camera end).
   
2. Place a film canister over the end of the plug and press it into the cap.

These caps also protect the threads on connectors and allow a damp connector to breathe.Kodak canisters won't work because their cap fits on the outside of the canister and would fall off if you performed this surgery on them.The credit for these caps goes to Capt. Jerry Thomas, USN, who's been my buddy on a couple of tropical trips.

- Chuck Tribolet, NCUPS Newsletter 5/98

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New Airport X-Ray Machine

Kodak has notified photographers there is a new piece of X-ray inspection equipment, the CTX-5000, currently being installed in major airports worldwide. SFO either has one, or will very shortly. This system is designed to inspect checked baggage only, not carry-on. Unlike the traditional carry-on X-ray machine, both the film makers and the manufacturer make it clear that there's a reasonably high probability of this bomb-seeker fogging your film. This unit performs two types of scans. The first is a general sweep, which is harmless to film. The second is a focused, high-energy scan targeted at anyh suspicious items identified by the system in the initial sweep. If this second scan happens to strike unprocessed film, it will ruin the film.The severity of this problem would appear to be great for professional photographers. Your options are limited:

• Don't carry unprocessed film in checked baggage.
  
• If you must carry large amounts of unprocessed film, contact the airline prior to your flight to make inspection arrangements which would not involved using the CTX-5000.

- NCUPS Newsletter 5/98

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How to Calibrate Your Light Meter

Monte Smith

If you are doing wide-angle photography, a good underwater meter is a necessity. A "good" meter is one that will allow you to correctly measure light in the exposure range you will be using. A "good" meter can therefore be almost any meter that works. Moving needle type meters are usually less accurate than some of the more recent digital meters found in expensive SLR cameras. The Nikonos meter is somewhat variable in accuracy, similar to the moving needle types. Let's assume you have a meter you want to use. What we don't know about your meter is "Will it give an accurate reading in the range I will be using?" This range will be somewhere around f/4 to f/8 at a shutter speed of 1/60 to 1/30 second. Even if your meter gives incorrect readings, it can be made to perform correctly by adjusting it against a standard. Here's how: first, you need to use a second meter that is accurate. If you are able to use a high-end electronic camera or a hand-held electronic meter, you can assume for the moment that you have that accuracy. Next, you need a gray card. A gray card is available at any photo store worth its salt. Go into your backyard and prop the gray card up on a table or chair in an orientation that doesn't let your shadow fall on the card.

Next, take a meter reading from the card with your "accurate" meter. Note that if you are using a meter in a camera, you will fill the frame of the viewfinder with the card and take a meter reading. If you are using a hand-held "incident light" meter, you will place the meter in front of the card, pointed toward you, and take the reading. Now, do the same with the underwater meter you are testing. Make sure the ISO and shutter speed settings are the same for both meters. What does the underwater meter say? Does it agree with the "accurate" meter? If it does not, you need to adjust it. You can do this in two ways. Some meters have an adjustment screw on them to calibrate them. Some don't. For these, you can adjust them by changing the ISO, or film speed setting. For example if your underwater meter gives a reading one f/ stop different from your "accurate" meter, double or halve the ISO speed on your underwater meter until the two meters agree. Next, you are going to take slides of the gray card (NOT prints) using the exposure information you have determined to be correct. Take notes on your frame number, exposure, and light meter reading. Start with the light-meter recommended exposure and work up and down the f/stop scale a couple of stops in one third or one half stop increments in both directions. In other words, you are going to intentionally underexpose some frames and overexpose some frames. Get the film developed and compare the slide exposures to the gray card using a light table. By doing this, you will verify that your "accurate" meter is functioning correctly and whether you should adjust your underwater meter any further for best results. Note that Nikonos users using the internal light meter will have to adjust their ISO speed, and this will also change any TTL exposures using strobes. You probably would be shooting your strobes manually anyway on wide-angle pictures, but it is something to consider. Once you have "dialed in" your light meter, write down your conclusions in your log so that you don't forget the results. Happy shooting!

- NCUPS Newsletter 12/98

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Chuck Tribolet

After about fifty trips out of Monterey with my Whaler, I don't think I've seen it all, but between my guests and me, I think we've made most of the bonehead mistakes one can make diving from a small boat. Here's how to make yourself popular with a boat owner so you get invited back.

Take your Dramamine, Bonine, or whatever. These drugs take a while to kick in, so take them well before departure. But don't take them at home: The second scariest thing that's happened to me while diving was driving to Monterey at 5:30 a.m. to meet the Cypress Sea after dropping a Dramamine or two at home. I'm lucky: After diving most every weekend for a year, I've gotten my sea legs. Most occasional boat divers get queasy. They have good company -- Charles Darwin was sea sick the entire round-the-world voyage of the Beagle. He went ashore in strange places like the Galapagos to get on solid ground.

1. Be on time. Allow time for camera and gear rentals. Get your gear ready. THEN stand around talking.
   
2. Space is at a premium on a small boat. Bring what you will reasonably need, not every piece of dive gear you own. Except big dome ports, leave the lens cap in your car.
   
3. If it needs to stay dry, bring what it takes to keep it dry: Drybox, ziplocks, whatever. Small boats are a very wet place, and saltwater has a way of getting everywhere. If you have something like aland camera where getting it wet would be a major disaster, double or triple wrap it. A ziplock in a towel in a Pelican case would not be overkill.
   
4. Bring a windbreaker. Just a single layer of waterproof material will cut down greatly on the evaporative cooling between diveds. I wear a big TruWest coat on my Whaler, but it would not be welcome on a smaller boat.
   
5. Bring a hat. Even a baseball cap will make a huge difference in how warm you are on the surface. The diver's rule that you loose half your heat through your head aplies on the surface too. My old scoutmaster used to say, "If your feet are cold, put on a hat." A hat will also help keep the sun off. If it's a fast boat, bring a hat that ties on your head so it doesn't blow off.
   
6. Bring shades. If it's a fast boat, put a neck strap on them.
   
7. Prepare your camera at home. It's warmer and the light is better, so you are less likely to flood it. It's also harder to leave a key part at home if you bring it all assembled.
   
8. Ahead of time, inquire about how many tanks, lunch arrangements, and whether the boat has a head. Have your tanks full when you get to the Breakwater, or allow extra time to fill them.
   
9. At the boat, ask the owner where things get stowed. Some boats have a place for everything, some just pile it on the deck. One good rule of thumb is dive gear forward, people and cameras aft where the ride is smoother.
   
10. If you are a dry suit diver, visit the head shortly before departure.
    
11. Before leaving the dock, find out how to start the boat and run the radio, just in case something happens to the captain. I won't be insulted. After all, it's me and my camera you'll come pluck out of a raging current.
    
12. Learn to tie two basic knots: a bowline and a weather hitch. The bowline puts a loop in the end of a line, the weather hitch ties the boat to a cleat on the dock. The weather hitch is probably the more important for a guest, and is the easier to learn.
    
13. Offer to pay for gas. Until a couple of years ago, it was illegal for the captain to accept anything, even a glass of water, unless the captain and boat were appropriately licensed by the Coast Guard, which nobody but the commercial boats are. In 1993, as part of the Coast Guard appropriations bill, Congress made it clear that it was OK to "share the expenses of the day." I wonder which Congressman's brother-in-law got nailed by the Coasties. Now, you will probably get turned down, and will definitely get turned down on an NCUPS boat dive, but the offer will be appreciated. If you are particularly creative, your offer might get accepted. The best I've seen was the bone-dry ten dollar bill Andy Sallmon claimed he'd found on the bottom.
    
14. Take a US Coast Guard Auxiliary or US Power Squadron boating safety class.

- NCUPS Newsletter 12/99

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Negative Space
by Chris Simmons

What is negative space?

anything that's not the subject
figure-field relationships:

figure = subject
field = background (what the viewfinder sees in addition to the subject)
how does your subject relate to the space you have enclosed it in?
can the figure become the field?
negative space should contrast with the subject
darker than the subject
lighter than the subject
a different color than the subject
out of focus (while the subject is in sharp focus)

Why do my photographs need negative space?

makes the subject "pop" (be easily seen by your intended viewer)
people look at pictures in the following order

in focus
light to dark
high contrast to low contrast
eyes to lips to nose (on a human face)
Remember: eyes/head are important in animal photos.
can add significantly to the overall appeal of your subject and the composition of your photo

How do I use it effectively?

look for good negative space _then_ look for subjects
compose your photograph
think about:

critical focus
lighting
contrast between figure and field
the spacial relationship between figure and field
the shape(s) of the negative space (look at it, instead of through it.)
check all the edges of your viewfinder for bad negative space

backscatter is hidden bad negative space
distracting objects, shapes

check the area around your subject for bad negative space

a lamp post, tree, or kelp sprouting out of your subject’s head
an unexplained column of bubbles

For more underwater photography tips from Chris Simmons, visit his website

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Destructive Seaweed Threatens California
Caulerpa taxifolia

All coastal marine life is at risk from this devastating non-native seaweed. Caulerpa taxifolia has the ability to form a dense smothering blanket of growth on any surface (rock, sand, or mud). It is capable of growing up to one inch per day. New colonies can be started by a small fragment of the plant and expand to cover more than 75 square feet within one year. Caulerpa can grow in shallow coastal logoons as well as in deeper ocean water, and has been reported to survive up to ten days out of water.

What does it look like? Caulerpa taxifolia has a brilliant green color and grows in the form of flat, leafy (fern-like) fronds that extend upward from each main stem. Each stem can grow to nine feet in length and have up to 200 fronds. This algae can be found as individual plants or in dense blankets that may cover many acres.

Where has it invaded? It has invaded the Mediterranean Sea, with devastating results. This seaweed has recently been discovered near Sydney, Australia and now in San Diego, California. The recent infestation in San Diego is believed to have resulted from a release from a home saltwater aquarium.

How can it be stopped? Early detection of all infestations, prompt containment, effective eradication and prevention of any new infestations. Do not use this seaweed in your aquarium. Do not release any water, plants or animals from a saltwater aquarium into a street, storm drain, creek, bay, lagoon or the ocean.

What can you do? Your help is critical to the success of California's effort to eradicate and prevent further infestation by this destructive marine seaweed. If you find any of this seaweed anywhere please contact one of the agencies listed below and provide the following information:

Where you found it (including significant landmarks and water depth).

Your name, telephone number, and email address.

Agencies to contact include:
National Marine Fisheries Service
562-980-4043, bob.hoffman@noaa.gov

California Dept. of Fish and Game
858-467-4218, wpaznokas@dfg.ca.gov

SD Regional Water Quality Control Board
858-467-2952, peteg@rb9.swrcb.ca.gov

For more information visit: http://swr.nmfs.noaa.gov/hcd/caulerpa.htm

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