I am at the Manila airport at the beginning of a 6-hour layover. It’s chaotic outside, with long lines to get into the building and constant blasts of traffic officer whistles piercing the air (I had to take a taxi to this terminal). I remember wondering whether there would be a Continental lounge here, and it’s only after arriving that I realize how stupid that question had been. I’m hungry and thirsty, and can’t find a place to get food/drink nor a place to camp out where I might be able to do some work comfortably. No wonder my row-neighbors on the plane were packing airplane food away into their bags! (read more »)

It’s nice sometimes to talk with people who are on a similar schedule. I just got an email from Alissa: “I am in Eastern Chad at the moment and will be available on a local cell for the next three days, then I’m off to Uganda to do a story on mountain gorillas!” (read more »)

Thanks to the friends who are always there for me and who make an attempt to keep track of when i’m here in town. :) VT got the master of her 3rd CD today. It sounds wonderful, but sadly is missing the KLONG YAW(!!!), which will always have a special place in my vocabulary.

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Girls are weird. I was over at Vienna’s place last night and discovered a bottle of weird-ass lotion in the bathroom. I believe the question I asked when I emerged was, “what part of the body do you lotion that has hair on it?” The Batcho was there, too, following up with, “It’s like a store in there. Wait, doesn’t ‘curl enhancing’ need a hyphen?”

And then there was the enormous box of shoes in the kitchen…

I suppose that my equivalent would be the enormous box(es) of camera gear I have strewn about in my place. :)

fill ‘er up! a tiger shark gets a taste to eat.

- Updated: March 25 - I’ve posted ten eleven videos of our time on the Shear Water in the Bahamas to give you an idea of what diving with large sharks is really like. We spent a lot of time in the water with seven different shark species: tiger sharks, bull sharks, great hammerheads, lemon sharks, caribbean reef sharks, black-tip reef sharks, and nurse sharks. (read more »)

UPDATE If you are looking for tiger shark videos, I have posted a medley of the best footage I have, compiled from longer clips.

This is my first trip shooting video (trip details), and while we’re docked here at West End for the evening (running away from bad weather), I thought I’d try uploading a little video snippet. The uploaded video looks pretty bad and it almost pains me to share it this way, but… what the hell. :) (read more »)

Eric with Jim Abernethy on Shear Water

Greetings, from the Bahamas! We’re docked at West End, sitting out high winds tonight. Had a psycho tiger shark experience today that I will try to post video of, soon. Jimmy summed it up: “too many, too big, too close!” It drove me straight out of the water less than 10 minutes of fun.

We have 4 Seacam digital SLR housings, 4 Subal digital SLR housings, 1 Sealux digital SLR housing, 1 Light & Motion Bluefin HD, 1 Sea & Sea digital SLR housing, and 1 Aquatica digital SLR housing, and a Nikonos V on board with us. While the number of housings on board isn’t so impressive, the sheer value is. Good times. :)

Lots of familiar faces on board with me here: Al Vinjamur, James Wiseman, Alex Mustard, Jim Abernethy, Lazaro Ruda, Paul Ng, Captain Grey, and a bunch of Wetpixel folk with whom I had corresponded but never met in person.

I was sitting at the West Palm Beach airport with Al Vinjamur this evening, waiting for Paul Ng to fly in from Shanghai. When Al noticed that I had a Blackberry in one pocket and a my mobile phone in the other, he said, “dude. you’re, like, going to screw up your future kids.”

I replied, “no way, man. i keep them out of phase.”

HAHAHAHA!

Ok… maybe you had to be there. Where’s the “Dork” category in this journal? I need to make one.

sherry & kitties

Sherry hosted James Wiseman and me last weekend while we were in Boston for the Sea Rovers’ 52nd Clinic (Thank you, Sherry!). I don’t get to see Sherry that much, so it was really nice to catch up with her and to finally meet the second of her two cute, friendly kitties (Stella and Simba). Stella is six years old, but looks like a baby because of her tiny head and huge eyes. She acts like a baby, too. Simba is more independent, but you still can hoist him into the air and hold him there forever without a single complaint. I took about a billion photos of them. (read more »)

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While I was in Boston last weekend, I stopped by Louie and Stephanie Leguia’s place to check out their line of Luis and Clark carbon fiber violins, violas, and cellos. The reputation of their carbon fiber instruments is good — and well-deserved. After trying out six of the cellos (and having a home-cooked dinner), I walked away a new owner. It will be a fantastic alternative to my Will Whedbee cello for travel — and, it’s just neat to own something so big made of carbon fiber (the gadget-geek in me is satiated!). :)

The cello was shipped to me overnight, and was still in tune when it arrived at my door. (read more »)

It’s a strange situation when time at home seems like a break from normal life. I had a whirlwind 4 days, with most of my time spent hanging out with friends, dealing with a bunch of new gear that arrived all on the same day, and slogging through a neverending TODO list.

I’m excited because this next trip to the Bahamas (for sharks, again) will be my first time shooting underwater video. I’ll be shooting with a Sony Z1U HDV camera in a Light & Motion Bluefin HD housing, and with a Sony A1u topside.

Since Monday, I’ve had the fortune of spending time with Cindy, Vienna, Mandy, Elliot, Geoff, and Livia, and I also met Joanna Suan (for the first time), an avid diver girl from Ontario. (read more »)

Thanks to Victor A.’s recommendation, I finally made my first iTunes music store purchase: a multi-pass ticket to The Daily Show (my favorite show — I manage to watch many of the episodes despite never being home and never having access to the Comedy Channel. I met one of the producers of the show while I was out in Cayman Brac last week, which was really exciting…).

I hate the idea of buying music from iTunes because it’s sort of like the first sip of Apple kool-aid (and, it only works with Apple playback applications), but buying episodal video is perfect: I get to download, watch and delete, and so I’ve paid simply to watch the show once. (read more »)

I recently acquired a Sony Z1u HDV camcorder (a beefed-up FX1), and I’m having problems getting my Thinkpad to recognize the camera via firewire. My Dell desktop PC works fine, but connecting the camera to my notebook via firewire yields nothing (with both a LaCie Firewire 800 PC card, and an Orange FireWire Cardbus PC card). The camera recognizes that there is a firewire cable plugged in, but the computer doesn’t see the device at all.

I also tried plugging in a non-HD miniDV camera, and it didn’t work, either. Has anyone out there gotten video capture to work on a Windows notebook that doesn’t have a firewire port built in?

Please don’t tell me that I have to get a Mac! Although, I probably will, if I get really serious about video.

Try this on a Windoze box:

1. Run Photoshop. Drag an image from Mozilla into Photoshop’s gray background area. You’ll get a dialog box with image size and name pre-populated, but when you click “OK,” Photoshop will open a blank document.

2. Run Photoshop. Drag an image from Mozilla into Photoshop’s taskbar rectangle, wait until Photoshop gains focus, and then drop the image into Photoshop’s gray background area. You get no dialog box, and the image will open properly.

Lame.