I’m speaking at the Stanford Photography Club at 7:30pm on Tuesday, October 5, 2010. They don’t know what room they’ll be in yet, but it will be in room 200-105 in the History Corner (building 200). I’ll use Twitter to announce the actual room number sometime before the talk. If you’re going to come, I’d recommend parking at the oval.

Since it’s a general audience, I’m going to open with a little summary of how we do underwater photography, followed by a talk on sharks and finally, the 20-minute TEDx talk on flashlight fish and sperm whales.

Jack Nuttall plays at the wheel

I’m not really excited about the image quality that comes from camera phones these days, but I do enjoy having a camera with me at all times!

These must be trawled, deep-water anglerfish / frogfish (boo!). I’m not sure how fisherman would harvest shallow, reef-dwelling frogfish in an economical manner.

Background: Jim Abernethy is deathly afraid of scary movies.

From: Eric Cheng
Date: September 25, 2010 10:33:40 PM PDT
To: Jim Abernethy
Subject: The Shining, trailer

Jim:

Watch this trailer for The Shining. See? It’s not that bad — you’ll be fine, if you see it!

From: Jim Abernethy
Date: October 2, 2010 6:06:44 AM PDT
To: Eric Cheng
Subject: Re: The Shining, trailer

I guess the movie isn’t scary or is this a trick?
Save The Sharks,
Jim

From: Eric Cheng
Date: October 3, 2010 9:15:32 AM PDT
To: Jim Abernethy
Cc: Wade Walcher
Subject: Re: The Shining, trailer

Jim -
It’s not too scary! I’m cc’ing Wade on this. He’ll back me up.

Wade?

From: WADE WALCHER
Date: October 3, 2010 9:33:02 AM PDT
To: Eric Cheng
Cc: Jim Abernethy
Subject: Re: The Shining, trailer

The one I watched was not scary at all.
Wade.

Sent from my iPhone

From: Jim Abernethy
Date: October 3, 2010 9:26:37 AM PDT
To: Eric Cheng
Cc: Wade Walcher
Subject: Re: The Shining, trailer

OK Joke’s on me! The other trailer wasn’t the right one! I just found this on you tube! Very very scary! I couldn’t even watch the trailer! Save The Sharks, Jim

I processed one of the Fuji FinePix Real 3D W3 images today using StereoPhoto Maker (running in Parallels).

3D image of Peter with flames at his ground-breaking celebration (anaglyph red/cyan glasses required). You can also check out the universal L-R-L version, which looks much better (if you know how to view them)

The Fuji gives a good 3D effect that looks great on its rear lenticular 3D LCD, but when viewed at a normal size, image quality is horrible. This image above was taken at ISO 200, and is still really crunchy (and has low dynamic range). All I can guess is that it was too expensive to put two high quality cameras lenses, sensors, and processors into one camera body.

Still, it’s fun.

My recent video featuring sharks biting a GoPro HD Hero camera in an Eye of Mine underwater housing has just been released on DiveFilm HD. It is similar to one of the videos I posted earlier, but now has a “making of” section and a voice-over description of what is going on.

DiveFilm is an underwater video podcast put out by Mary Lynn Price and sponsored by Wetpixel. We are very excited because it is currently (as of today) the #1 Sports & Recreation Podcast on iTunes! Since the iTunes ranking is based on downloads, I encourage you to watch the video through iTunes even if you streamed it from this post. Support DiveFilm! :)