Last year I was fortunate enough to have been invited to participate in the First Annual Digital Shootout in Manado, Indonesia (see http://www.stephenfrink.com/sf-reports/indonesia), and while I must admit I knew very little about digital imaging at the time, the Digital Shootout Team definitely opened my eyes to a powerful new technology. Beginning at a point where I'd never taken a digital underwater photo before, and in fact barely knew how to open a folder on my computer's desktop, that week's immersion in the "brave new world" of digital imaging radically changed my style of image capture. From shooting 100% film, now just one short year later I'm shooting at least half my photos in digital. It was so obvious to me that digital had to be part of any working pro photographer's arsenal that within 2 months after attending the Shootout I'd purchased a Nikon D1X digital SLR and a Seacam housing. Now with ever more powerful digital cameras capturing bigger and better files, and chip sizes now emulating traditional 35mm film size, resolution equivalency with film is in sight. Clearly the time is right to learn all we can about digital photography, and for that the Digital Shootout remains the premier venue.

Stephen Frink and Jim Watt

Conceived by Berkley White of Backscatter Video and Photo, Dan Baldocchi of Light and Motion, and Rich and Gail of Todd Productions, the Digital Shootout evolved from a very successful series of photo programs known as the Monterey Shootout. With a template of photo education and prizes combined with excellent dive adventure and conviviality, this formula proved an easy fit with digital imaging. They recruited pro shooters Jim Watt and me to provide lectures on our shooting techniques and workflow issues, and invited Adobe evangelists Julianne Kost and Daniel Brown to provide seminars on Photoshop and Premiere (software programs for digital stills and video). And then of course they picked destination well suited to excellence in underwater photo-ops, Bonaire; and a pair of resorts with long tradition in serving underwater photographers, Divi Flamingo Beach and Captain Don's Habitat. Clearly the formula has merit, for the Digital Shootout has grown from 30 participants last year to over 90 this year.

Join us on www.scubadiving.com as we relay daily updates from Digital Shootout. Beginning with Sunday's recreational dives and evening cocktail party, and running through the classes and in-water digital photo sessions of the week, and finally on to the grand awards ceremony on Friday, share our virtual tour of Digital Shootout 2002.

Note: If you're interested in receiving information about the 2003 Digital Shootout, send an e-mail to Berkley White at sales@backscatter.com.

Sunday
Most guests arrived on Saturday, but that was a long day of travel, especially for those who live on the West Coast. They left late Friday night and then took a red-eye in to Miami before connecting on to Bonaire. By the time most everyone hit the island there was little time for much other than dinner and a few beers before bed. Clearly all those O-rings and housing maintenance were going to have to wait until the morning.

The Bonaire Marine Park requires that all divers do some kind of a check-out dive from shore before boarding the dive boats, so the morning was spent getting checked into the dive shop, working out buoyancy issues, and doing a shore dive. Gratefully both Flamingo Beach and Habitat have very productive house reefs, so most of the Shootout photographers had an opportunity to test dive their cameras before the serious imaging begins on Monday. Still, as can be seen from the images contributed already, there are several very skilled digital photographers seeking to advance their knowledge, in addition to a number of shooters more interested in having their first exposure to digital photography. To accommodate a widely divergent experience level, the Digital Shootout provides multiple tiers of education, including:

Digital Demo Days - Light and Motion and Olympus have teamed up to provide photographers access to the C-3040 camera and Tetra housings for in-water testing. Staff will assist in downloading images and burning CDs.

Digital Photo Technique Lecture - Berkley White will lead shooters away from the automatic mode of digital and show them how to creatively capture underwater photos on pixels instead of film.

Digital SLR photography - Stephen Frink, Director of Photography for Rodale's Scuba Diving, will take the Nikon D1X and Seacam housing as a basis to illustrate high-end digital capture, including workflow issues with RAW files, how to archive images, and how to present digital files for publication.

Brave New Worlds - Jim Watt is a prolific and accomplished underwater photographer who has embraced digital as his future. He will present a lecture on special techniques and the software and hardware that enable him to weave technology and artistry.

Video Shooting Techniques - Hendrik Wuuts of Scuba Vision Films on Bonaire will devote his lectures to enhancing underwater video production.

Adobe Premiere - Bringing the power of sophisticated digital editing to the desktop to enlightened videographers, Adobe Premiere is a powerful tool and Daniel Brown is a powerful educator.

Adobe Photoshop - This is perhaps the marquee series of lectures of the Digital Shootout series. Adobe evangelist Julianne Brown is an extraordinary mentor in all things Photoshop, and her two lectures on Photoshop techniques will open the bottle to release a genie of creativity for the digital artist.

Stay tuned.

An image from Sunday

Photo by Stephen Frink

Monday
This is the first serious day of shooting. For those with their own digital cameras it means jumping on the boats for the morning dives out of Habitat and Divi Flamingo Beach Resort. And for those who are just now learning the craft of digital imaging it meant meeting with Dan Baldocchi of Light and Motion at the Divi Flamingo Beach Resort property for the first of the Digital Demo days. Dan brought an ample supply of Olympus 3040 cameras in Tetra housings, and while the time necessary to explain and set-up each system precluded demonstrating the systems aboard the dive boats, Bonaire is blessed with shore dive opportunities. Shooters got to work Calabas Reef and found plenty of marine life willing to pose before their Tetras.

For those of us on the dive boats, it meant trips to Klein Bonaire or along the leeward shore of Bonaire. The local divemasters are particularly skilled in finding the tiny and elusive critters that so define the Bonaire dive experience, so it is no surprise that Shootout participants came home with great shots of seahorses and frogfish, along with more of the usual suspects. But the shooters were very clever about finding subjects on their own as well, and afternoon download sessions revealed plenty of reef squid, spotted morays, peacock flounders, rock hind, spotted drum, and French angelfish. So far most seem to be concentrating on fish and macro portraits, although a few have now begun capturing wide angle as well.

For our boat, a dive to the famed Town Pier was probably undoubtedly the most productive of the day, with photo opportunities for seahorse, pufferfish, spotted morays, chain morays, spotted drum, queen angelfish, pufferfish, and schooling grunt. While the night dive at Town Pier is probably the marquee dive on Bonaire, I must admit I much prefer this dive during the day for the extraordinary diversity of willing marine life found here, combined with the wide angle potential provided by the richly encrusted pier pilings and the schooling fish normally in residence.

A table of Seacam housings.

My lecture this day was on "Digital Capture & Workflow" issues with a digital single lens reflex, namely the Nikon D1X. Much of what we discussed will be relevant to a whole slew of new D-SLRs now hitting the market, including the Fuji S2, Canon D60, and the Nikon D100. Pro photographers Doug Siefert and Jim Watt are both here this week shooting Sea & Sea housings for their Canon D60s, and Berkley White is running the Sea & Sea D100 housing through its paces as well. In addition, there are at least six Seacam housings for Nikon D1X. So, while last years Digital Shootout was all about the Tetra housings for the Olympus 3040, this year people are shooting all manner of digital tools. From a Nikon Coolpix 5000 in an Ikelite housing to a Sealife Reefmaster Digital to Light and Motion Titan housing for the Olympus SLR, a profusion of imaging tools are in play at Digital Shootout 2002.

This evening Habitat hosted a lovely party, complete with live music and an LCD projector to view a sample of the day's digital take. But before we got to that point, a crew of four, each with laptops and CD burners were kept busy from about 4:00 this afternoon through nearly 9:00 tonight just processing the jpegs from the camera's card readers, saving them to folders on their desktops, and optimizing them for projection. Anyone who has ever experienced the massive back-end work issues that accompany digital imaging will appreciate the Herculean task of organizing daily submissions of 3 to 5 images from each of 90 shooters. Thanks gang.

Images from Monday

Photo by Stephen Frink	Photo by Stephen Frink	Photo by Stephen Frink
Scene from a seminar	Checking the display	Ernst Schilling at the Habitat Photo Center
Julianee Kost and Daniel Brown	The sun sets on the first full day of shooting.	J.C. Gamble and Nick Lucey (both with Rodale's Scuba Diving) sit with Jim Watt and Doug Siefert.

Stephen Frink does some digital editing on the boat.	Gearing up for a night dive	Captain Don Stewart	Dana Weber and Berkley White

Tuesday
By this day our digital shooters are well immersed in the technology of image capture and are beginning to concentrate more on the artistic and creative side of their craft. Dan Baldocchi's Digital Demos are well attended at Divi Flamingo Beach Resort this day, while over at Habitat I reprised my Digital SLR presentation and Jim Watt presented a presentation on the new trends and techniques that motivate him as a pro shooter. Unfortunately, he and I were booked at exactly the same time so I did not get a chance to attend his lecture, but no doubt it was fascinating. Gratefully, I have another chance to sit in tomorrow as he revisits his presentation, and will defer the report until then.

However, I did manage to sit in on Julianne Kost's Adobe Photoshop I presentation. This drew the largest crowd of any of the seminars thus far, for good reason. Julianne is an extraordinarily skilled Photoshop practitioner and educator, and the skills she introduced this day are crucial to anyone seeking to capture and process digital images. Photoshop users in the audience may have recognized many of the basic controls she discussed--things like levels adjustments, color controls, and sharpening for example. But there are so many nuances and subcategories of these controls, as well as shortcuts and means to enhanced efficiencies, that all came away respectful of the power of the program. And this was only the first 2 hour session of Photoshop I. No doubt the topics covered in Thursday's Photoshop II will be equally fascinating, albeit considerably more challenging for a Photoshop novice like me.

Photo by Stephen Frink

Yet for all the terrific seminars and gracious offers of loaner gear, the star of this year's Digital Shootout remains Bonaire's coral reefs. With consistently calm seas and excellent water clarity, this is a perfect venue for photo education. The marine life is diverse and approachable, and the dive guides know where to point out the subjects of interest. Like today's frogfish on Rock Pile for example, and yesterday's seahorse on the Town Pier. Yes, maybe I could have found either critter by accident, but it was far more efficient to have a helpful guide point out these masters of camouflage.

Judging by the images in tonight's projection presentation, the dive boats must have visited the Hilma Hooker shipwreck, several dive sites off Klien Bonaire, and of course the house reefs off Divi Flamingo Beach and Habitat. So far most of the shooters seem to be concentrating on the fish and macro life for which Bonaire is justifiably famous, but as there is a competition element to all this, and prizes to be awarded for wide angle as well, no doubt the wide view will start to show up in many of tomorrow's digital portfolios.

Images from Tuesday

Julianne Kost leads Adobe Photoshop I.	These two digital shooters are using the Tetra housing by Light and Motion.
Working on laptops during the Jim Watt seminar	Daniel Brown shows off his new Rodale's Scuba Diving Get Out & Dive More! T-shirt.	Shootout participants relax at the evening's cocktail party.

Wednesday
This morning Dan Baldocchi and I passed on our way to our respective assignments. He had a Pelican 1620 case full of Light and Motion Tetra housings, complete with Olympus 3040 cameras, and was headed for Divi Flamingo Beach Resort to provide Digital Demos. I was on my way to Habitat to dive with a couple of shooters eager to learn more about the Seacam D1X housing. Each intended to use the reefs of Bonaire as our underwater classroom. While I didn't get to sit in on Dan's seminar, I did hear it was very thorough and a great help in shortening the learning curve on the Tetra housing. As for me, I hope I was able to present some of the obvious advantages to the digital SLR system. By handling the housing in the water a few things are immediately evident:

• There is no digital lag between pressing the shutter and executing the exposure. Some of the more entry-level cameras do experience lag, and it makes capturing peak action underwater very difficult.

• The single lens reflex viewing system is easier for composition and critical focus than an LCD screen, especially in high ambient light.

• We are able to capture large files in the RAW format (NEF), each of which can convert to a 33 megabyte TIFF. This allows far greater resolution than some of the digital point-and-shoots that some are using this week.

We did our in-water session from one of the Habitat boats off Klein Bonaire. While we didn't find any particular Bonaire icons like the seahorse and frogfish from yesterday, our dive this day at South Bay did provide some nice tube and elephant ear sponge at depth, and among the hard corals in the shallows were large trumpetfish hiding amid the gorgonian, French angels, parrotfish, and a photogenic school of goatfish.

Back on shore at Habitat I ran into Doug Siefert and Jim Watt, both ready to take a dive along the house reef, and each holding brand new Sea & Sea housings for their Canon D60s. Both were extremely excited about their new tool for digital capture. Which made me think how anyone who has been taking underwater photos for as long as we all have can still be energized and inspired by the new excitement that digital brings. There is the challenge of integrating a new work flow and technology, combined with the power of driving these high resolution machines. I suppose in three years we'll all be scoffing at our primitive Canon D60s and Nikon D1X systems, but for now, this month, it is state-of-the-art and we are enjoying the learning process every bit as much as any of the other Digital Shootout participants.

My second dive this day was from shore. As I was headed back to Divi Flamingo Beach Resort, I saw one of their dive boats tied off to the Town Pier. Of course that's a dive I'd never miss on purpose, so I drove out to the boat, borrowed a tank and got in the water just in time to meet up with my friends--for a few minutes anyway. Our dive guide Lutty had already spied the best seahorse set-ups and graciously pointed them out to me before they motored back to the resort for lunch. Which left me alone beneath the Town Pier with a couple of cameras, lots of air, and terrific photo opportunities.

Actually, not to blaspheme the Digital Shootout and their pixel-packed tools, but I still had a lot of fun on this dive with my trusty Nikonos RS and 13mm lens photographing the heavily sponge-encrusted pilings and doing close-focus wide angle with the school of grunts constantly in residence. The medium was film rather than digital, but that's still an important imaging medium. In fact, that's kind of how it goes for me these days--film for the extreme wide angle images and digital for the fish and macro shots. Maybe when I start shooting with one of the new full-frame sensors I can emulate the normal film angle of view of my lenses rather than sacrificing the reduction in focal length that accompanies the smaller footprint of the computer chip. At that point, combined with the new 11 - 14 megapixel cameras that are now available, maybe film really does become obsolete in my camera bag. But for now, I'm not as convinced film is dead as Jim Watt appears to be, but in his lecture today he did offer some pretty powerful persuasion as to the power of all things digital.

Jim's lecture was entitled "Brave New Worlds" and was an overview of why he thinks digital has already eclipsed film for the professional underwater photographer. Other aspects of the lecture involved digital composites, special tools to achieve special effects (things like Quicktime VR for navigating 360-degree images), and software for slide presentation. One interesting point he makes is that almost all imaging is digital anyway, at least in the print world. In fine art there are still those who use film to enlarge for custom prints, but anything that ends up on the printed page gets digitized at some point along the way anyway. Either it starts out as digital or it is scanned from film as digital, but almost all presses are digital these days. So, why not begin with digital if that's where it is going to end up anyway? Then of course there is the World Wide Web, which is definitely a digital medium. Stock photos are researched and delivered via e-mail from digital files, high-res files are burned to CD, DVD, or archived on FTP sites for clients to visit. The commerce of imaging is so integrally digital; we in the business have to pay attention.

Images from Wednesday

Learning new tricks for Adobe Photoshop	Julianne Kost leads the Adobe Photoshop seminar.	Jim Watt presents "Brave New Worlds".
A local iguana lounges in the foliage.	The dock at Captain Don's Habitiat	The organizers of the 2002 Bonaire Digital Shootout
Brant Shenkarow gets ready to shoot.	A shot of the Hilma Hooker by Shootout participant Bailey.	Shootout participants relax at Captain Don's Habitiat.

Thursday
As the week's shooting begins to draw to a close, the participants are concentrating on the gaps in their portfolios. Judging by the four boats I saw tied up on the Hilma Hooker shipwreck this morning, most must have deemed themselves deficient in wide-angle and were looking for a good shipwreck to make it happen. As it turned out, our boat was headed for the wreck as well, but decided to motor on to the Salt Pier to avoid the crowd while at the same time immersing ourselves in wide-angle photo-ops. This turned out to be a great call, for we discovered cooperative queen angelfish that were incredibly approachable (for a change), numerous octopus, rock beauty, butterflyfish, and of course the colorful sponge encrusted pilings that made such lovely backgrounds. Even though we were all tasked to the wide view this morning, our guide Enrique was kind enough to point out a great seahorse set-up which totally did not work for my 180-degree lens. Oh well, it was nice to view, even if impossible to photograph with this camera/lens combo anyway.

For the second dive we went to Forest on Klein Bonaire. I've always been fond of this site for its prolific (and massive) orange elephant ear sponge, but presently there is a lovely yellow frogfish that resides in one of those sponges. With directions even as precise as "swim 10 minutes to the west at a depth of 52 feet and watch for the orange sponge" did not give me much confidence, for usually frogfish are so camouflaged that even knowing where they are to within a 3 yard radius still presents a "Where's Waldo" puzzle for me. But in this case the frogfish was utterly obvious, resting exactly on top of the sponge as if posing. Joe Gamble of Rodale's Scuba Diving agreed to work with me for this wide-angle series today and proved to be a great model, adding that all important "element of composition in silhouette" to the background for this series.

Of course there were several dive boats with Digital Shootout participants departing from each resort daily, and while we might hear snippets of dive tales around the lunch table or bar, it is the evening slide show that really tells the tale of where people dived and what they saw. For those staying at Habitat the week was filled with extraordinary squid pictures, for it seems their house reef was heavily populated with amorous squid this week. With their minds so targeted to reproduction, these squid were apparently unusually approachable and wonderful behavioral photos were captured daily. Surprisingly though I didn't see too many night dive shots. The night dive prerogative was possibly reduced because we had events scheduled each night, but the night diving in Bonaire is so very easy and so very productive, I expected more nocturnal critters to show up in the daily download sessions.

Education remains an important part of the Digital Shootout formula, and today's courses included presentations by both of our Adobe evangelists. Daniel Brown offered an immersive glimpse of powerful video editing software known as Adobe Premiere, while Julianne Kost continued her tutoring of all things Photoshop. Building on her introductory presentations on Tuesday and Thursday, Julianne jammed massive information regarding layers, composites, titles, and special effects in a two-hour session at Habitat. Both sessions are available again on Friday, and given the complexity and breadth of the information offered, it is not a bad idea to attend twice just to fill the gaps induced by NIADD (nitrogen-induced-attention-deficit-disorder).

The squid at Captain Don's Habitat

This afternoon all the DSO shooters had to choose their final selects (one each per category). So, tomorrow the judges will have the difficult task of choosing a first, second, and third prize in the following categories:

Macro/Close-up
Wide-Angle
Topside
Photoshop (can be either creative or simple image enhancement)
Video

The competition aspect was not the number one objective for most DSO shooters it seemed; instead the chance to learn about the new digital paradigm and enjoy the wonderful diving on Bonaire appeared to be the prime motivation. Still, one can not ignore the generous travel and equipment prizes that DSO organizers have arranged. Stay tuned tomorrow for our final installment of my Digital Shootout Diary, devoted totally to presenting the prize winning images. And since the text will be minimal tomorrow, preferring instead to concentrate on what I know will be stunning visuals; we invite anyone interested in joining next year's Digital Shootout to visit www.theshootout.org for details and schedule.

Images from Thursday

Photo by Stephen Frink

Winners of the 2002 Bonaire Digital Shootout
Video

Place	Winner	Prize
1	Marsha O'Shaunnesey	Light & Motion Mod Light + Adobe Premiere 6.5
2	Ken Bailey	Adobe Premiere 6.5
3	Don Bellio	Backscatter $100 Gift Certificate

Macro

Place	Winner	Prize
1	Jeff Farris	Divi Flamingo Dive Package
2	Okie Lopresti	Adobe Photoshop 7.0 + Ultralight Pivot Tray
3	Fred Fisher	Backscatter $100 Gift Certificate

Wide Angle

Place	Winner	Prize
1	Art Schumer	Habitat Dive Package
2	Ken Bailey	Light & Motion Tetra Housing
3	Pat Hearn	Adobe Elements 2.0

Creative / Photoshop

Place	Winner	Prize
1	Jim Platz	Manta Ray Bay Resort, Yap Dive Package
2	Maryke Kolenousky	Adobe Photoshop 7.0
3	Ken Bailey	Backscatter $100 Gift Certificate

Topside

Place	Winner	Prize
1	Marsha O'Shaunnesey	Adobe Elements 2.0 + Olympus Media
2	Carol Herrlie	Backscatter $100 Gift Certificate
3	Anne Fisher	Olympus Media

Winners in multiple categories were able to select their favorite prize. All additional prizes were awarded to the remaining shooters by raffle. Remember, there are no losers at the Digital Shootout, just some are more prize-challenged than others.

Judges:
Jim Watt: wattstock.com
Berkley White: backscatter.com
Rich Todd: theshootout.org
Daniel Brown: adobeevangelists.com

RELATED LINKS

Connectivity for daily updates provided by Bonaire WebCams Event Sponsors www.theshootout.org www.stephenfrink.com Rodale's Bonaire Travel Guide