Sometimes it’s a good thing to mix things up a bit. A week ago we were down at Hout bay getting ready for a seal dive off the boat. Suddenly, we realised someone forgot to pack the the clients fins. I won’t mention any names!

So my DM and I decided to jump in with the seals sans fins. We floated down to the bottom and sat back to back and let the seals do their thing. It was refreshing and a great way to view the seals. Next time you do a seal dive just sit down lie back and enjoy the spectacle! On another note have a look at these two photos, both taken on this dive. I changed the colours in both and it looks as if they were taken in different oceans. So with a bit of clever manipulation you can work wonders.

Summer is definitely almost here and a good indication of that is the fact that all our diving has been taking place in the Atlantic. The prevailing summer wind is the SE and that blows off shore on the Atlantic seaboard and this make for beautifully clear water. This weekend is going to be no different but the wind is forecast to drop off completely and that should leave us with some sublime, if chilly, diving.

We have our boat now and she is running beautifully. Our last couple of launches have been full and once again we are full for Sunday! At last she is starting to pay off her debt

I have a feeling that this will be a good busy season so roll on Summer!

Just so you guys know we do offer first aid training here.

It’s a really fun course and our staff are on hand to show you how to do things properly!

Hey guys,

In order to edit and fix up your pics nicely you need a good program like Photoshop. Photoshop is horrendously expensive though and if like me you can’t afford to buy it the you should try Gimp. Gimp or GNU image manipulation program allows you the same freedom as Photoshop but its FREE. Yup something s are actually free these days.  It is a open source software and you can download Gimp here www.gimp.org/

Also, if you shoot on RAW then you can download a plugin called UFRaw which will allow you to process RAW images.

All in all I am pretty impressed with the program. It does take a little getting used to but is pretty easy to work out if you are used to photoshop.

Happy snapping!!

Right I haven’t blogged in a rather long time and that is definitely going to change. Promise!

The problem was that I just found I was endlessly repeating myself on Facebook the blog and our newsletter. So now I am going to do a weekley blog about the most interesting things that go on around the shop.

For instance we had one of the worlds best cave divers diving with us yesterday!   We took Rick Stanton to see our stars, the seven gills.

I am also going to start uploading video of our dives and more pics so you can all see how beautiful the diving is around Cape Town.

So for a start here is a pic of a Fiery Nudibranch that I took the other day.  The original photo is rubbish but with a few simple techniques in Photoshop and it has turned out to be a great pic.

The first thing to do is crop your image to make it a more interesting compostion. Its also a good idea to try and compse the image as much as you can when you are taking it.  Then you have to change your levels and colour correction.  Red is the first colour to dissapear underwater, that is why the image on the left has that green cast.  There is also the auto function on Photoshop which does a pretty good job, Auto levels and auto colour correct.  It really isn’t that hard to fix up yopur photos nicely