We had the opportunity to test out a new scuba diving rebreather courtesy of Poseidon UK and my local scuba diving centre in Norwich, Norfolk. This Poseidon Diving Systems MkVI Discovery rebreather is the first truly recreational closed circuit rebreathers, perfect for the professional underwater scuba diving photographer.

Without boring you with the details they allow you to spend a lot longer underwater, and you expel no bubbles whatsoever, thus giving you a massive advantage by allowing you to get much closer to the underwater world that you would normally get with a standard scuba diving setup. This was my first time on a closed circuit system like this, and it was pretty enjoyable – I can definitely see the advantages to this kind of system for underwater photography. I only tried this new Poseidon MkVI Discovery rebreather in a swimming pool – so apart from a few rogue plasters there was little life to be scared away… not an adequate test.. but maybe next time I’ll be using it properly.

It was an interesting feeling breathing through a rebreather, once I got my buoyancy sorted it was incredibly easy to use (within reason – it is a piece of mega tech!)
Getting my head around the fact the air is just going round and round and being injected and mixed, cleaned and pumped to make it fresh again was a weird feeling! They retail around £5000, with around £20 per scrubber replacement every 3hrs.. a mere snip! Found some cool scuba diving t shirts whilst looking for scuba kit though…

Walking around the pretty whitewashed streets of Lindos both in the early morning and late evening when the sun was at it’s coolest and before the tourists got in the way. The fourth image down is my favourite in this selection, the contrast between the two sides and textures makes for an interesting image.

In the pretty town of Lindos, on the South coast of Rhodes sits the little chapel at St Paul’s Bay, where we attended a great wedding a couple of weeks ago. Out for a stroll in the evening to take a few photographs of the bay, having been sheltering from the heat for most of the day – well, since laying in the sun a few hours earlier… The wedding went really well and was very enjoyable to be there, a pretty place to have your wedding. Thanks Kerry & Chris!

I’ll hopefully be putting some of my other images of Rhodes up in the next few days, I have a few more photographs I would like to add on my blog assuming I remember. It was a great 10 day little escape from the grey skies here in England, and miss the glorious Rhodes sunshine already!

We arrived in Rhodes early yesterday morning, to a beautiful blue sky and wonderful heat. We had arranged to meet the owners of the rented accommodation in the town square at 7:30am, as supposedly the place was hidden away somewhere in the back streets of Lindos. We grabbed the first taxi we saw, “all prices fixed and in book” was the answer to the question to the extortionate fee on the taxi rank at the airport. The classic line: “we must get petrol” mid journey didn’t help when the obligaory timer is tick-tocking away.

After the somwhat scary taxi ride from airport to Lindos, we arrived at the beautiful central square, bathed in golden morning light and under a massive sweeping tree acting as the local roundabout. So we sat, as arranged, for the owners of of little self catering villa/flat to come and find us, very few people around apart from the street cleaner and a couple of old boys. Half an hour passed, still no sign of them. Decided it was probably a good idea to try and find some information about the location of this place and maybe get to it ourselves. We only had a number and a name, no one answering the phone, still asleep perhaps. Eventually asked a couple of locals who were sitting around, and after much gesticulating back and forth, they managed to get in contact with a man who knew someone who knew someone else… either which way “2 minutes and woman will come” sounded like an epic solution. 10 minutes later an old woman appeared out of a side street, shorty followed by our man, Stavros.

The man, Stavros

On reaching our accommodation we were pleased to be able to stare out of our veranda onto the beautiful blue green bay. Lovely little room, small sink, hob and saucepan, just the one, or 2 if you account for the metal teapot. Metal teapot, probably perfect for boiling rice I guessed.

Starting to unpack, phone battery almost dead, best send the relevant people a message to keep them in the loop, charger found.. Just need to find the plug socket. Hmmm. Nowhere. Surely you can’t have a room somewhere as developed as this and have no plug sockets? Surely. Searching high and low, found nothing. Hmnn. Here for photography and a wedding and nowhere conveniently obvious to charge the plethora of electronics I seem to stuff my bag with. Gave up, decided I would think about it in the morning.
Ah right, ‘that’ plug socket. Literally the three random non symmetrical holes in the wall. If only i had realized. I had thought they were, well, holes. Nervously plugging in our travel adapter it was soon evident that there was infact some form of power from these magical holes. Perfect.

Time to taste the local hummus and halloumi, beer and cocktails. Wonderful.

Some iPhone images of our first day:

[View with PicLens]

A great result from TinEye reverse image search today, a recommendation to anyone who may have images online that they want to try and keep track of, especially if they are not watermarked.

A little about TinEye: “TinEye is a reverse image search engine. TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version.”

I have spent a fair amount of time on TinEye in the last couple of years, I was one of the early users of this software back when it was only just out of it’s beta stage, and loved the idea. It its early stages, it struggled finding images, as it still hadn’t indexed some of the bigger search engines and image libraries, and I seem to remember telling them about loads of image libraries that hadn’t yet been indexed. A couple of years on and they are really starting to get involved, it seems the search engine has now indexed over a billion images, a fair feat for a company that is still running on donations only.

So I randomly did a check on a couple of images on one of my blog posts, I chose my blog post with an image of some french shutters (Image 3)- I chose this one because looking at Google Analytics the night before I was getting search traffic for ‘french shutter photos’ and as I remembered that this image for some reason had slipped through my watermarking process.. and may be a easy target. I loaded up TinEye and pasted the URL of the actual image on my website, clicked the search button and let it chug away for literally only a couple of seconds.. and it returned an interesting result. (Image 1)

Tineye found a reference to one of my images, and showed that it had searched 1.6 billion images, and had picked up a usage of my image on quite a large blogging website, so I checked the URL provided by TinEye and had a scout around the site until I found it. Nothing sinister about the usage, they were just talking about choosing the right image to represent your blog post, but even so – they didn’t ask for permission to use this image, so I was justified in contacting them. Due to the positive nature of the image within this blog post, I spoke to the lady in charge of the website who apologised for the error, and I agreed that she could continue using the image as long as she linked to my website from the image. She changed it straight away, what an excellent result.

So thanks TinEye, a great outcome, and I suggest that you should do the same with your images. It’s a long process, but perhaps a random check now and again doesn’t hurt.. you never know, you might just find one..

For more information have a look at TinEye here.

So we’ve decided, finally that thing we need more than anything right now is a mega round the world trip. Just like that. It’s been a long time coming, and the timing has always not been quite right, but it seems, come October this year we may have the opportunity for an adventure. Watch this space! I think there may be some awesome photographic opportunities along the way too..

iPhone photograph

About time… I took the plunge and bought a 32Gb WIFI iPad last week, loaded it with photos and showed my photos to a few people, great feedback – leading to one person going to buy one for themselves the next day. I’m not going to bang on about how good it is but rather put it to the test over the next few months, and if it’s honestly just sitting on the shelf unused after a couple of months I’ll stick it up for sale… (yeah right!)

So I bought it primarily for promotional purposes, it’s a great device to just have me to show prospective clients new work, but also as well as for me just to have a device that I can keep a huge amount of photographs on for just myself! I hardly print any images at all these days, and viewing them on the iPad feels as good as actually printed.

I got my vote in on this beautiful morning in Norwich South, weird feeling when you put an X in the box and hope you can actually make a difference, even though I still don’t feel I know all the issues and all the outcomes of every candidate – so it’s always a bit odd hoping you’re backing the right side…when you don’t know all the facts, especially when you look at policies that affect photography / photographers / arts & culture. Although I have voted before, for some reason this election seems to mean more to me than any of the others… perhaps it’s just what getting older does? or maybe because it’s been on all media for so long now almost forces you to engage with it that much more, it’s all good surely?

Either way, the deed is done, let’s see what happens tonight… and the next few years…

Nine photographs of the architecture and the skyline of Hong Kong from my recent trip.. all these images are represented by the Malaysian stock photography agency: Photo Asia, to see them here please visit photoasia or here if you want to license straight from me via my photoshelter archive.

The jagged tooth like tower blocks, looking up from the Happy Valley Racetrack.

Looking over Hong Kong Park:

The Lippo building, designed to look like Koalas climbing trees!

Looking out from the traditional Star ferry, looking towards Central and Wan Chai.

The neon Hong Kong skyline:

All my images are represented by the Malaysian stock photography agency: Photo Asia, to see them here please visit photoasia or here if you want to license straight from me via my photoshelter archive.

Photoasia, a Malaysian photography stock agency expressed an interest in representing my recent photographs of Hong Kong from my trip in January, and pleased to mention that they were kind enough to use one of my images of the Hong Kong skyline on the front page on their website which was a pleasant surprise, thanks PhotoAsia!

Link: My portfolio on Photoasia
Link: Photoasia website