Little Cayman - unirdna and cdavis reporting

[Jon]

Actually,

I offered to lend them one of my monofins, but Connoer's feet are too big and Ted's little elf feet are too small.

I had the same impression watching that video when I saw them kicking for so long in bi-fns.

One of these days, when the kids are bigger, I'll be able to afford warm water trips again.


Jon

[cdavis]

Jon, you need to grow bigger feet.

Connor

[tommygun53]

Excellent Video!! Who sings the song on your audio track?

Freediving training in Cayman is on my Top 10 list for sure!!


-Tom

[Fondueset]

Jolly well done!
Recognized that song from 'The Bourne Identity' - very nicely done!

[land shark]

Nice video guys! Thats really awesome the shot with the sun reflecting off your mask. Now I know why the fish spook once in a while.
The quality of the pics are really nice. Did you have a wide angle lense?


jim

[SanderP]

Downloaded the high res video and I'm really amazed. Also liked the slow-motion scene and the one where you filmed your own feet (at the beginning). Moby's Extreme Ways was a perfect song for the background. Love it, can't wait for your second video.

Keep it up!

[cdavis]

We had some fairly odd shark behavior, if anybody can shed some light on this, please chime in.

Twice in the first two days we had sharks acting out of the ordinary. Lots of caribbean reef sharks in Little Cayman, but scuba divers (who are Very numerous) seldom see them. On day one, coming up from a roughly 90 ft dive, I saw a reef shark come vertically up the wall after me, coming fairly fast, not just gliding along like normal. I was going away from him at the time and kept going. He got to the top of the wall, maybe 45 feet, pealed off and went back down. No big deal, but out of the ordinary for this type of shark. Day two, 65 ft dive, I saw a reef shark coming across the bottom in my direction, again coming faster than normal. As I rose toward the surface, he came right up to me, met me about 15 ft. I stopped, put my fins out in his direction ( not having a spear, or anything else, in my hand is a paranoid feeling). He came up almost touching distance to my fins, turned away, came back, then went over to Ted. who had the camera and recorded the shark coming up to him. That part is on the video. Then the shark went over and bumped our float hard and finally left. Not a real big deal, but this is definately Not normal behavior. There is a possibility that an adjacent dive boat had been (or was at the time) feeding sharks.

After thinking about it, I began to wonder if being freedivers had something to do with it. It was pretty clear that freedivers are very very rare in Little Cayman, Nobody we met had seen freedivers in action. We do move a lot different from the scuba divers the sharks are used to. Maybe they were just curious and were reacting strongly to something unusual moving away from them. In any case, every time I saw a shark thereafter, I went after him, intentionally showing some aggression. Saw a lot of sharks but had no further trouble. Every time they either kept on slow cruising or went back to that.

Any thoughts on this?

Connor

[Fondueset]

This may sound odd - but when they are in the mood the Carp here act just like that Shark - specifically - they approach at faster-than cruise - and do alot of approaching and abrupt veering off. I'd agree with your hypothesis that they are checking you out.

[unirdna]

Originally Posted by cdavis

...then went over to Ted. who had the camera and recorded the shark coming up to him. That part is on the video.

I was thinking that my wife deserved "closure" (and a proper life insurance settlement). That was my first EVER shark encounter

More media is on the way.

Connor, your disks will be in the mail tomorrow.

[cdavis]

I'm salivating.

Did the explaination make her feel better or worse? Wait till you see the back side of Abaco, where the sharks are realy aggressive. Lets not even consider the Jumento's.

Connor

[Fondueset]

I nearly get airborne when a carp blows by without warning. Cdavis - are you salivating because sharks make you hungry??

[cdavis]

Naw, they scare me s----less. I can't wait to see Ted's pics on something larger than the camera screen.

Airborne eh. good description. After my first really scary shark run-in, I realized that walking on water didn't have to be a miracle. All it takes is sufficient incentive. I've come real close to flying more than once.

Connor

[icarus pacific]

VERY easily some of the best U/W freedive footage I've seen, and that's a lot. Really, really great!!

The editing and sound, the fades and the use of some killer stills to break the video sequences, guys you just nailed smooth!!!

The only thing it lacked was me with a 60" hunk of stainless-laden teak.

Howzabout some info on the photogear for us aspiring video types. And does compressing footage of reflections from the mirror over the office reduce the quality???

[unirdna]

Thanks Swede.

All photos AND video were captured with my Canon S80. No wide-angle lenses or any other bells or whistles - camera and case, that's it. Just got the toy before the trip. Connor and I agreed that having a camera is absolutely necessary for non-hunting trips. Without the thrill/goal of a hunt, you need a substitute.....so, you "hunt" for better photos and vid. You also use the camera to remind yourself of all the fish you could have killed (and man would I have liked to plug those stupid hogfish - I was getting hungry filming them).

The video is very large - at least, at the quality I like to capture (640x480 30fps). Camera takes Secure Digital (SD) cards, and the largest size currently available is 4GB. I had two, and filled them both. I can get about 35 min of video per 4gb card. Good thing is that the camera allows you to crop/edit the vids - very important since space is at a premium.

The post editing was done entirely on windows moviemaker. If you are running XP, you already have this. I've used other programs (Ulead, Adobe, Pinnacle, Cyberhome), but wasn't impressed. Those "flashier" programs simply come with more hoaky transitions. I hate that crap. Who in the hell wants to use a "starwipe"??? Anyway, I prefer fades and blends, and movie maker does a surprisingly good job at that with a relatively quick learning curve - it's made by MS, afterall. I wish it could do zoom and pan on photos, but it's pretty solid considering it's bundled "free" with XP. I encode with a very high quality bitrate. Because most of the screen is blue, the video size doesn't get too large. And to give MS it's fair shake, windows media video (.wmv) is a pretty solid codec (stands for "compression/decompression"). Only Mpeg4 (DVD), DivX or Xvid is better. WMV is solid for sending stuff around the web, and even decent for playback on a TV.

I don't lose all that much quality by encoding (if I use a high bitrate). You see colors blend a bit, and freezing a frame isn't as clear. The camera captures video in "motion .jpeg". This basically means that the camera takes 30, 640x480 photos every second (with audio). Thus, you can pluck any one of those frames out and use it as a photo. It also has a setting that captures in 1028x768, 15fps. This mode is a little choppier, but the photos are good enough to print on a 4x6. Basically, the ultimate "rapid fire" mode.

[Fondueset]

Cool!

On my site below all the pics and movies near the bottom - after it says 'New Camera!' are also with an s80.

Unirdna - I've been using windows movie maker to compress mine as well - I choose the option that lets you pic best fit to whatever number of mb you choose - and choose the max it allows. I just did one that wanted to be just under nine- but was able to save at 20 with a much higher bitrate. Diff is somewhat visible. More experimentation needed. Please post any helpful hints!