Freeflow

Last chance to post this year

Newcastle Quayside at twilight

It’s 8:30pm on New Year’s Eve – last chance to post anything on this much neglected site this year.

2007 hasn’t included too much in the way of diving. We saw Tasmania (plus a single dive up in Queensland on the Brisbane) back in January. Following our move to landlocked Colorado in March we didn’t see the water again until November, when we spent a few days in Cozumel over Thanksgiving.

I have some video of the Cozumel dives that I’ll get finished up in the next few weeks and posted on this site.

The photo at the top of this post is Newcastle Quayside back home in the UK, where we spent Christmas. No doubt the quayside saw some determined partying this evening!

Best wishes for 2008.

Stephen · Monday, December 31, 2007, 19:28 · Permalink · Comment

Published!

Ribbon reefs

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from the editor of ECOS magazine, the house publication of Australia’s CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), asking permission to use a photo included on this site to illustrate an article to be featured in an upcoming issue.

The photo in question was of me (plus a few fish) and was taken by Alice while she was doing her PADI Underwater Photography Specialty. Of course, we were happy to oblige, and now the photo is duly published!

You can see the ECOS article here.

Happy to say that the article conveys some good news: the Coral Sea Fishers Association has agreed not to fish some of the Coral Sea’s finest dive sites, including Osprey Reef, where we dived in 2003.

I’ve read more and more reports of the benefits of no-take zones in restoring balance to overexploited ecosystems. Indeed the benefits don’t only accrue to reef inhabitants and divers – fishermen report greater catches in adjacent areas as stocks are able to grow to maturity and reproduce in the no-take area before moving out to populate fishing areas.

Whether the same applies to areas as isolated as Osprey Reef, I don’t know, but for sure, there are other economic benefits to maintaining these sites in good condition for ecotourists.

Stephen · Friday, July 20, 2007, 22:02 · Permalink · Comment

Colorado: a long way from the ocean

Sunrise over Sprague Lake

As is probably evident by now, new content has been lacking from this site for a while. The excuse? We’ve been busy relocating from London to Colorado, where we expect to be for the next couple of years.

A glance at a map will show that Colorado is rather a long way from the sea: 950 miles to the Gulf of Mexico, 770 to the Sea of Cortez, 830 miles to the Pacific coast, and 1480 to the Atlantic. That’s about as far as I ever want to live from the ocean.

That said, Denver airport is well-connected and our new location makes some fantastic dive destinations more accessible than they were from the UK. My top five are:

  • Galapagos
  • Cocos
  • Baja California
  • Bay Islands, Honduras
  • and (if I can ever face any more temperate water diving) Vancouver Island

In the meantime, the US Rockies and Southwest offer some wonderful top-side locations to visit, such as the Rocky Mountain National Park (see photo above – dawn at Sprague Lake).

Settling in here has been easy to date: life takes a lot less planning than in London, where simply driving from home to a shop needs either careful timing or unbounded patience (due to traffic).

We’re hoping to fit a dive trip in around September. Not sure yet whether we’ll manage any of the destinations above – certainly, Galapagos and Cocos require more forward planning (not to mention cash) than we’ve allowed…

Stephen · Friday, April 20, 2007, 22:07 · Permalink · Comment

YouTube upload quality

It appears that uploading to YouTube isn’t always completely straightforward. I’ve had a few enquiries via e-mail in recent weeks from people who’ve found that their videos, once processed on YouTube, have degraded in quality to an unsatisfactory degree.

I’m told that the quality of the vids I’ve uploaded looks relatively good. So, if anyone’s interested in the settings I’m using, here goes:

1) Source: all the videos I’ve posted were shot on a Sony DCR-HC1000E camcorder, a 3CCD Mini DV camera.

2) Capture and edit: all the clips are captured and edited in Apple’s fantastic value Final Cut Express.

3) Export: prior to upload, each clip is exported from Final Cut as QuickTime movie. Given the need to stick within YouTube’s 100MB upload limit, plus the fact that I also want to upload to this site (all videos are here), I export (File/Export/Using Quicktime Conversion) as a standalone movie, optimised for ‘Broadband – High’:

Export settings

Clicking on Options, the default Broadband-High settings are:

Movie Settings

Because most of what I shoot is 16:9, the default size (which assumes a 4:3 aspect ratio) needs to be tweaked. Clicking on Size, the height is reduced to 270. That’s it: the clip can be exported.

4) Upload to YouTube: per the normal process, using the standalone Quicktime file exported in Step 3.

In short, if these settings appear to work better than others, I’m not entirely sure why. One thing to check – it probably makes sense to check that the resolution of the file you upload is higher than the standard YouTube playback window (452 × 338 on my PC): you don’t want YouTube trying to up-sample your video for playback.

That said, YouTube’s own recommendations seem to be at odds with what I’m doing. If anyone can explain the reasons for the differences, let me know.

Stephen · Tuesday, January 30, 2007, 16:30 · Permalink · Comment [2]

Back from Oz

Remarkable Cave, Tasman Peninsula

I got back home from Australia a week ago. Compared with our normal trips, this wasn’t especially intended as a dive holiday, but I still managed a handful of dives.

We revisited the HMAS Brisbane (which we last dived in October 2005) and then made some dives around South East Tasmania.

Alice took the photo above near Remarkable Cave by Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula (here). Suffice it to say that the weather wasn’t like this the whole time we were there…

However, weather notwithstanding and with the help of our friends Keith and Clare, I did manage to see and video the weedy sea-dragons.

Video of both locations to follow…

Stephen · Monday, January 22, 2007, 17:48 · Permalink · Comment

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