After managing to completely skip last week’s fantastic diving weather, I was determined to get out over the weekend. Of course the weather closed in and the Heads got worse. In desperation to get wet, I ended up at Pope’s Eye. With low expectations I was pleasantly surprised by spending a fun hour photographing gannet bottoms.

Australasian Gannets pair up and nest in big breeding colonies, including on the rocks and platform at Pope’s in Port Phillip Bay. When feeding they dive into the water at high speeds, grab a fish and swim for the surface. The rest of the time they appear to have a great social life. From the boat I watched several turf wars and some friendly social sparring underway. Landing birds would circle to find a good spot, with birds sitting on the water needing several hops across the surface to get into the air.

I was in stealth mode underwater and not producing any bubbles. This allowed me to hide in the refraction of the surface, completely invisible to the floating birds. The inside of Pope’s is shallow and all of these photos were taken from between 1m deep and surface level.

Once I got close enough to be inside Snell’s window, the bird would either swim a metre further away, or stick their head under the surface to see what I was doing down there. The stickybeakers were persistent, alternating between a quick check on the skies and underwater face. Being eyeballed by a gannet while underwater is a fairly unique experience.

After half an hour of flashing their bottoms and occasionally getting a beak in the picture, the gannets were relatively comfortable with me. The photo settings were relatively consistent – high shutter speeds to deal with the bright sky overhead, a touch of one strobe to bring out the shadows and the feet, and a mid range f-stop to keep everything sharp. The main issue was the sand in the water from the course divers practising exercises in the middle of Pope’s, and the difficulty of reviewing shots in bright sunshine. It took some persistence to get angles I was happy with, and to find the curious birds who kept looking down. For a very shallow dive, it was very productive on the photography front.

2016 seems like it’s only just begun and 2017 is already sneaking up on us. With the end of the year in sight, my 2017 calendars are now on sale. Calendars come in both cave diving and ocean flavours with lots of space to note your important dates for the year. The caves side features a number of beautiful shots from the Timorese caves with a good mix of local and exotic. On the ocean front this year’s calendar is dominated by big animals in blue waters – whales, sharks, mantas and more.

The photo pages are A4 (approx 12″ x 8″) with the dates grid on the page below. The calendars are ringbound with a punchhole for hanging. Even better, prices have dropped! Calendars are now just $25 AUD for a calendar and $5 postage in Australia or $15 postage overseas. I’m also offering in person delivery at the CDAA AGM weekend in Mt Gambier for those who pre-order. In case you want a wedding album or else Nemus Photography is the right fit for you, is stunning and original.

Payments can be made via PayPal to liz@lizrogersphotography.com or by EFT.

The caves calendar features the following images:

And the ocean calendar looks a little like this:

It’s that time of year again, with Christmas creeping up on us and the pages of last year’s calendar starting to run out. Calendars f0r 2016 are now on sale. As with previous years I am doing a cave calendar and an ocean calendar. The caves version includes some stunning dry cave shots as well as the underwater stuff. And my ocean diving in the last 12 months reflects more on colourful temperate sponges and some rusty wrecks than the tropical critters of the previous version (though I did manage to squeeze one turtle in there). The full set of photos in each calendar is below.

The photo pages are A4 (approx 12″ x 8″) with the dates grid below. Prices remain the same as last year, $30 AUD for a calendar and $5 postage in Australia or $15 postage overseas – a single postage cost can be used for up to five calendars. For Australian delivery, I’m throwing in free postage if you place your order before the end of October. If you are overseas the rapidly dropping Aussie dollar provides a great discount.

Payments can be made via PayPal to liz@lizrogersphotography.com.

And the ocean calendar pages look a little like this:

If you’re in the area, come along! The Friday night presentation should have a few nice images in it, showcasing the different diveable caves around our country. It’ll kick off at about 6.30pm on August 28th and the address is:

Shop 5 – 188 The Entrance Rd
Erina NSW 2250 Australia

You can send an RSVP to Ian on sales@diveimportsaustralia.com.au. If we find we have more than enough people to fill the shop, the talk may be relocated to a bigger venue. While you’re RSVPing, book in for an Adelaide dive on Saturday. Saturday afternoon back at the shop after diving will be a more informal affair, having a look at everyone’s photos from the day and chatting about all things underwater photography.

Hope to see you there!

While I was pootling around underground in Mexico, this website passed its fourth anniversary. Four years since I spent a weekend setting up web hosting and nervously publishing my first photo and article. I didn’t tell anyone what I’d done for fear of early criticism sinking the whole grand idea. As I said two years ago I was afraid of having one of those two-post blogs, where the second post was about not having much to say “but be sure to check back soon!”. To avoid this I wrote my first dozen articles well before I posted the first one. For most of 2011 I had a 10 article buffer that slowly became a 6 article buffer followed shortly after by feeling good about life if I was a week ahead. By mid-2012 I’d discovered that writing about a dive that had just happened and posting it the next morning was much more satisfying. It wasn’t until 2013 that last minute procrastination caused me to miss my self-imposed deadline.

Four years later and with 200+ articles posted, I’ve gotten used to the idea of having a website that people might actually look at and an email list of (?eager) readers. Despite a few small lapses early this year I have mostly kept to my once-a-week posting schedule. Happily I’m still underwater most weekends and generating more than enough photos to fill the space. There’s certainly been fun periods where I’ve had more photos I wanted to talk about than weekly spots to talk about them in, a good sign of lots of diving being undertaken. The photo above was from a fun little dive off Phillip Island two month ago that somehow missed the posting schedule. Bright sunlight let me bump the shutter to 1/500 and catch Dad splashing in using natural light only.

On the technical side various plugins have crashed a few times but generally speaking the website itself has kept trotting along with very little maintenance. I’ve taken the time recently to make a few small tweaks to the layout and the sidebar, compressing the expansive archives and hopefully improving the readability on small screens. I’ve also updated the Index page so those looking for something in particular can browse through easily. Minor updates to the content delivery and code should improve loading speeds on slower connections. A friendly wave also to those reading this in their inbox who shouldn’t notice any difference at all. If you’d like to sign up for a weekly email delivery, stick your email address in the box to the right and hit Subscribe.

I’ve also discovered that WordPress now supports integrated, tiled galleries. I know this discovery puts me a little behind the times, but I thought I’d celebrate four years of life on the web with a mish-mash of my favourite shots from along the way. I have no idea if this gallery will work on email or RSS, so you might need to click through to the site itself. Thanks for reading – here’s to the next four years!

Besides the fun of the main game in San Agustin and La Grieta on the PESH 2015 expedition, there was also some surface activity and trips to smaller objectives. Corey spent a day wandering the jungle and covered a huge distance from our lodgings. The universe being what it is, he found a highly prospective cave entrance on the way home, less than 200m from where we were staying. He came back with this news late in the day and made it sound enticing. Sometime after dark we decided to go and have a look.

After sliding down the hill from the road through some particularly spiky vegetation, Corey relocated the entrance. I was expecting a small hole in the ground that required either a climb up or a rope down. Instead there was a comfortable 1m in diameter entrance hole with a sloping rock floor into a large tunnel. Score! Despite best advice we’d followed Corey down in moderately inadequate caving gear. After a short travel down the passage and one hand line drop it became apparent that real equipment was going to be required. We scrambled out and went back for a drill, ropes and a survey kit.

Equipment gathering (and marking the board up at the fieldhouse) caused a bit of conversation. Besides Corey, Zeb, Katelyn and myself a few other people slid down the hill to come and look at the entrance. The four of us grabbed the gear and proceeded in with Corey rigging ahead while Zeb and Katelyn surveyed and I alternated between painting survey stations and taking photos. While the tunnel was relatively straight and allowed long shots on the survey, the sketch needed to take in flowstone formations all over the place. It felt very similar to the start of the Fool’s Day Extension in San Agustin, with multiple short drops covered in flowstone.

The nice thing about having the high speed people occupied with important jobs is that they don’t move very fast. I was able to place strobes on the floor, grab a few shots of work in action and also hijack Katelyn from disto duty. The first image here is the second last pitch of the evening, taken just before 1am. Corey had just placed the bolt and dropped the rope to rappel down into unknown territory. From the top of this pitch we could see a large room continuing around the corner out of view.

The second picture is Katelyn, perched between two massive flowstone formations above the second or third pitch. There is a survey station up there and I turned around from seeking the next station to see her sitting there taking LRUDs. A quick jog down to fetch the camera and up the rope to pass up a strobe and I had this photo. As it turned out, after a handline and five short pitches the next flowstone decoration completely blocked the presumed way on. By this time it was 3am and there was no airflow to give us any hints. We packed up the toys and headed out with a few photos, a dozen survey shots and about 120m of virgin cave in the bag. Not bad for a midnight ramble.

I’m also looking forward to having a chat on stage with the famous Michael Menduno on topics as yet unknown. That one’s on Sunday arvo at 3.15 in the main auditorium.

Between those two scheduled appearances and when I’m not listening intently to the other excellent talks, I will be hanging out on the DKG Drysuits/rEvo Oz stall. Damo has very kindly offered me a bit of wall space and a bit of tabletop to display some prints for sale. If you’re wandering the floor and looking for someone to talk to about photos and cameras, come and see me! And if you happen to want a new drysuit or rebreather while you’re there, Damo can assist.

I’m taking advantage of some stall space to offer some prints for sale at steep discounts to my usual pricing. I will have 8″ x 12″ prints for $25, 12″ x 18″ prints for $50 and 20″ x 30″ prints for just $100. If you’ve been considering making your walls more interesting, now’s the time. I am taking preorders on the show specials as I will have limited stock available on the day. To take advantage of this offer prints need to be ordered and paid for before Feb 28th, and they must be picked up at Oztek. Drop me an email at liz@lizrogersphotography.com and let me know which images take your fancy and in which sizes.

I’m going to interrupt my current tales of France to let you know that I have just put my 2015 Calendars on sale. There is both a cave version and an ocean version, and both are beautiful – the photo above is August in the cave calendar. The photo pages are A4 (approx 12″ x 8″) with the dates grid below. This year prices are just $30 per calendar plus $5 postage in Australia. International postage is $15.

To order send me an email at liz@lizrogersphotography.com with your postal address. I accept payments by PayPal, also to liz@lizrogersphotography.com

Here’s a slideshow of the calendar pages in the caves calendar. If you’re reading this on email or RSS feed you may need to click through to the site to see the images.

And the ocean calendar pages look a little like this: