posted by Lars Kirchhoff on 05/29/2007
Curacao Dive Festival 2007 Live Webcast
Diving
As we discovered some of the wrecks of Curacao yesterday, we decided to
enjoy some more of the beautiful reef scenery here on the island. The very
tough but interesting program put some time limitation to our diving schedule.
For this reason we decided to take another dive at the Jan-Thiel Bay as we
didn't want to waste time with driving around. But nevertheless the diving at
this place is fun and has a lot of good photographic opportunities.
Starting with coral gardens of soft corals and sponges in the shallow areas
growing on the white, sandy bottom and making up the caribbean flair underwater.
In the more deeper areas the you find a gentle sloppy wall with loads of hard corals
and sponges. The reef were filled with loads of juvinele fishes. These coral garden
goes down to 60m, but we stayed most of the time between 5-15m.
Presentations
The host of today's presentations at the Curacao Dive Festival has been the
Sunset Water Resort in the mid-west of the island. From all the driving
around the island, we already begin to dream of the roads and know at least
the main roads very well. The road to the Sunset Water Resort goes through some
nice scenery and was very enjoyable. Almost at the Sunset Waters there is a
small hill where you can stop the car and have a wonderful view on the Santa Martha
Bay. Unfortunately this year is very dry, which makes the view not as nice as it
could be. Most of the scenery is "verdorrt" and there are only a few green spots.
In his presentation Marty Snyderman illustrated with some of his great shots
what's important to photograph silhouette underwater images. He kept repeating
how important the correct exposure of the background is, because this is will be
the part in the final image with detail as the silhouette should be all black.
Due to this another important aspect is to keep in my mind that silhouette images
are in most cases only pleasing when the contrast between background and silhouette
is hard enough as it would be with the sun behind the subject. After that very detailed
presentation on silhouette he continued to discuss the important factors on how
to shot balanced underwater images. These are the kind of images, where you try to
get the background proberly exposed with ambient light and the foreground with the
flash light.
The second on this day was Andi, with his second presentation on underwater videography. This time he discussed the different aspects and possibilities to plan and carry out a good underwater video. The central theme was on how to development a story and a good shooting plan in order to support that story. Both are things that are essential to create a good underwater movie. The less planned a shooting is, the more time and video sequences are necessary to choose the scenes for the movie and to finally produce the movie. Additionally some of the different camera movements, which can be used to add dramatic to movie sequences have been discussed.
Chill
Both presentation were followed from an interesting audience and was held in an
friendly atmosphere, which allowed questions within the presentation. This was
also possible due to the small groups of 15-30 participants, who attented the
presentations. For questions, which haven't been answered the participants could
ask the presenters at the pool bar, where a happy hour was organized from
Sunset Waters. Additionally a group of musicians and dancers played caribbean sounds
and rhythms and showed us how cheerful the hips are moved in the caribbean.
The final barbeque at the Sunset Water Beach was the perfect end for the day.
Enjoying the very tasteful food under full moon at the beach with a little breeze
provided a good atmosphere for chats about diving at Curacao and of course underwater
photography. Jack and Sue Drahfahl just reminded us, that we still have to write a review on their Photoshop educational material (book + DVD). Sue, Jack: we promise to write that review very soon.
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