The Road to Suva

Here are some more pictures of our road trip from Nadi to Suva… Enjoy!

A large outdoor market somewhere between Nadi and Suva

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Getting To Fiji…

I will say one thing for people who live on the west coast… they have it made when it comes to traveling to the South Pacific! All they have to do is show up at the airport before bedtime, board a big 747 jumbo jet, grab a pillow and go to sleep for 10 hours. When they awake its early morning and there in paradise! For those of us who live on the east coast it’s a little different story… (you can consider this the beginning of my ‘Fiji trip report’ even though it sounds more like a rant!)

Fiji’s Main International Airport – Nadi, Fiji

It’s the layovers that really get you… here, let me lay out our travel schedule for you so you can better understand. The whole trip started when we left for the airport around 11 o’clock Thursday morning. Our 5 hour and 47 minute flight to LAX wasn’t to depart Dulles International until 2:30 pm EST, but we wanted to get there early just in case United Airlines tried canceling the flight again (which they did 2 weeks earlier without bothering to notify anyone!)
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Some Turtle Pictures..

At the Super Bowl party this past weekend, Julie and I spent a little time with our close friends Chris and Valerie discussing travel plans for our upcoming trip to the Cayman Islands in June.

While we were talking, Valerie mentioned that she had a thing for ‘sea turtles’ and asked if I could get some good pictures for her while in Fiji. Well of course that is always the plan… to take as many good pictures of everything I see as I can, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to talk a turtle into stopping and posing for me in order to capture the exact photo you’re looking for. After all, they do have a mind of their own. Here are some turtle photos from a trip I took to the Cayman Islands back in July of 2005, I hope you enjoy them…
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Upcoming Fiji Trip!!

We leave for a two week excursion to the Fiji Islands this coming Thursday. Our hopes are for some outstanding weather so that we can bring back some beautiful photo’s of the islands for our new Websites.

Our first week will be spent shooting underwater photography while on the live-aboard dive vessel ‘Fiji Aggressor II’ and then the following week we will be on one of Fiji’s small outer islands in the Mamanuca Group known as ‘Castaway Island’. This will be our first trip to the South Pacific and we plan on making the best of it both above and below the ocean. If we have access to the internet during our stay in Fiji, we will try to upload some images or even a slideshow along with some trip reports to keep everyone interested until we can get back and have a chance to edit all the photographs from the trip.

Stay tuned… updates to follow!!

Packing For Fiji Trip!

Julie and I are currently trying to pack for our Fiji dive trip which is coming up in less than one week! The whole concept of just throwing some shorts, tee shirts and stuff like that into a bag just doesn’t work for us. With both of us being underwater photographers, we have to dedicate one ‘checked bag’ each to just our underwater photography equipment. That only leaves each of us one more bag for our scuba equipment, cloths, etc.

This one case is ‘just’ underwater photography equipment!

In the past, I’ve never really been too concerned with the weight of my checked luggage. If one bag was a little heavy I would just shift things around or at worst case pay the excessive weight charge on the heavy bag. But lately I’ve read several online articles about how touchy the airlines have become with regard to weight restrictions, and this has caused me to rethink the way I pack for a dive trip. As soon as we get to Fiji we will be boarding a dive boat for a week at sea. This means that any luggage that doesn’t make our flight with us (due to an over weight aircraft) won’t be getting on the boat with us. Being on a dive boat for a week in Fiji with no underwater camera equipment would suck… Big Time!!!!
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New Photography Websites!

Tropical Imagery Photography – Screenshot

I have just finished designing and building two new Web sites for hosting another kind of travel photography… Tropical Island Photography! These two sites are going to be mirror images of one another as far as layout and design, but they will both run seperate guestbooks and travel journals for the stats and, with a little help from Julie, some different content as well.

The new Web sites are:  Tropical Imagery Photography  and  Island Imagery Photography. I still have a lot of content yet to upload and the gallery is not setup yet, but this gives you a good idea of what the site is going to look like when completed (I’m thinking by the end of February.) 

I love designing and building Websites and even more so when they are personal sites. I get a huge high out of seeing the code take shape and the site spring to life once it hits the server. But having to maintain the sites and update the content all the time is another story. I still have two more personal Web sites to design and build when I get back from Fiji and I’m hopeing that once they’re finished I might be able to give one to Julie for hosting her own personal photography.

More on the Web sites later…

Equipment check-out for our Fiji trip!

Saturday night Julie and I drove out to Tyson’s to spend a couple of hours in the pool for a little Fiji pre-trip equipment check. The swimming pool is a YMCA owned and operated one that our local dive shop uses for scuba classes. It’s not the nicest pool in the area by any means, but most public (and private) pools don’t want to have to deal with the ‘scuba diver’ and all the equipment they like to bring into the water.

Julie at the YMCA pool in Tysons

I’ve heard lots of stories about pool owners having issues with the lead weights divers use or scuba cylinders banging up the bottoms of their pools, but until this past weekend I had never heard of pool owners blaming scuba divers for screwing up the water quality in a swimming pool.

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Photo Print Sales Website!

I have just finished setting up a new online account with ‘Smugmug’ to host and sell my underwater/travel photography. At the moment, I only have one collection of images uploaded, but for the future, I will be uploading new collections from some of the weddings  and other events I have photographed. In the past I have had to jump thru some serious hoops in order to fill print orders… with the new print sales account, all that is taken care of online and in house at Smugmug.

Photo sales page on Smugmug.com – screenshot

You can choose which photos you want to purchase; what sizes you would like them printed and you even have a choice of what the images are printed on (matte/glossy or canvas). All this is done with the ease of a shopping cart system and then the order is filled by Smugmug, where their professional print lab reproduces my photographs in the size requested. They then inspect the final prints for quality, package them and ship them straight to you. How easy is that!!

If you are interested in a specific photo you have seen on this site and you were unable to find it on my print sales website, please contact me directly via email at: imagesales@oceanimagery.com

Ocean Imagery Photography – Photo Print Sales»

Christmas Day!

This year Julie and I spent Christmas day at my parents place along with my brother, his girlfriend and of course his two dogs.  Chrismas day is always a nice gathering for our family and this year was no different! The best part for me is going home to Mom’s cooking!! I’m sure everyone would agree… you just can’t top a home cooked meal from Mom!!

Julie and I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for making this a great Christmas and a very happy and productive year! Follow this link for a few more pictures…
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Welcome To OceanImagery.com!

Welocme to the ‘New’ 2008 Ocean Imagery Photography online web journal. Over the next several weeks I will be conducting a series of tests and making a lot of theme/content changes to this journal. Feel free to add your comments and suggestions to this or any of our journal posts, while this part of our Website is being re-developed and tweaked to better match the rest of our site’s theme! Thank you for your support…

A little background on the ‘New’ Website:

Over the past month I have been in the process of building a new server to host my Websites. Hardware has never been my problem… I can put just about anything together and make it work! But tweaking it and setting up the software is another story. For this project I have had to go ‘back to school’, so to speak, in order to learn how to read & write PHP script. As this online journal starts to take form, you will find that it is much easier to navigate and more user friendly than the old one. Once I’m sure that the security I have in place is tight enough, I will open the journal up to my friends so that they may register as ‘users’ and place their own posts as well as comment on the posts that I make. Stay tuned… there will be more to follow!!

Thanks,
~Doug