Mavericks Diving are holding the Inaugural Essex Diving Festival from 28th-29th June.

There will be plenty of speakers on topics including Diving with Sharks, Freediving, Marine Life & Conservation, Mine Clearance Divers, and more.

There will also be “Have a go” sessions where you can try Freediving, Underwater Photography, or the Aqualung Mistral in the 6 meter pool, as well as Diving Demonstrations from a Royal Navy Diving Team, and Special Interest Stands from various Scuba-related companies.

Admission is just £5. For more details, click on the banner above.

I’ve finally managed to set up a (fairly simple) website to display some of my photos. Check it out at www.alanlarsen.co.uk and let me know what you think (there’s an email link in the galleries on the website, or leave a comment on here).

There’s a gallery of some of the photos from the trip to the Sudan that Brian, Charlie and I did over Xmas/New Year. The diving was great - far more big stuff than I managed to capture on camera (hammerheads, silvertips, and more…); the reefs were unspoilt - we dived a couple that have scarcely been dived; and we shared the sites with other divers on only one or two out of nearly 40 dives. I highly recommend it.

Hi everyone,

This is just an idea at present, but I know that there are quite a few keen Underwater Photographers in the club, and, inspired by last night’s Ocean Optics-organised UW photo lecture, and the latest issue of Underwater Photographer Magazine I wondered whether people would be interested in a UW Photography Course Liveaboard trip next year - probably to the Red Sea, since anywhere else would probably make the cost prohibitive for many people.

An underwater trip, naturally, concentrates on the photography. This means that you won’t necessarily be diving a different site every dive - sometimes you might dive the same site 2 or 3 times, so that you can learn from what you did on the first dive, and try to improve. The dives are likely to be mostly fairly shallow, because that’s where the best light is, and it provides the most time for taking photos.
Since the majority of people have compact digital cameras, I would choose a course/photographer which would focus on that type of camera, rather than the more expensive DSLR.

At this stage, I have no idea of time of year, cost, etc. - other than to say that it will probably cost around 40% more than a standard trip, depending on the professional photographer (or in other words somewhere around the £1000 mark).

For examples of the sort of trips I’m thinking of, have a look at a couple of similar trips with Alex Mustard, Martin Edge, and Maria Munn

If you might be interested in such a trip, please leave a comment below.

Here’s another UW Photography website that you might find interesting…