The last time Corinne visited (about two weeks ago), she came back telling me about seeing some squid — which got me REALLY excited (I love cephalopods). I was really worried that we’d show up and there wouldn’t be any.

Thankfully, I wasn’t disappointed! I also took some video, that’s going to take a while longer to go through. For now, enjoy the squid and eel photos that I posted to the Underwater Photo Gallery (along with one nice “seascape” looking up at a huge coral head from about 20′ down).

One thing she really wanted to see was a spy hop. Unfortunately, as it pertains to humpbacks and especially during their time in the Hawaiian islands, spyhopping is a fairly uncommon activity. But fortunately, someone forgot to tells this delightfully inquisitive whale that today.

I posted an additional 15 awesome whale images in the Fauna Gallery. I took about 1200 shots today and these are the ones that I liked. There were a lot of “empty” frames right before and right after the action in addition to incredibly redundant shots. There are plenty more that I liked that just weren’t as nice. I’m still holding out to get a nice shot of a breach. Maybe after I get back from my upcoming travels.

For what it’s worth, I rotated the image 90 degrees. The gecko was hanging on the wall head-down. I think the original pose (vertical) detracted from the shot, so I took the creative license to rotate it. If you’re familiar with my shooting style (no cropping, close to zero editing), this is actually a big deal.

The gecko itself appears to be living behind the medicine cabinet, which I find cute for some bizarre reason. I know this because I was only able to fire off 4 shots before he realized I wasn’t going away and fled wall-to-wall to his hidey-hole.

I’m just happy I had the opportunity to get some decent shots before he disappeared. I’m sure we’ll see him again.

It’s still fairly early in the whale season here, but there are still whales to be seen. Here’s a shot of one of the pairs that we saw this morning:

The other decision I made was to take the first trip of the day. This meant getting up at 4am, but it also meant we got to see a beautiful sunrise this morning.

There’s a few more in the Landscape Gallery.

I hope to make the Christmas day whale watch a tradition.

While we didn’t get to see any whales, we did come across an incredible treat — a Hawaiian Monk Seal!

There’s two more in the Fauna Image Gallery.

Latest estimates put the entire Hawaiian Monk Seal population at only 1060 individuals with only about 150 that live outside of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (which are mostly uninhabited).

The image may imply that I was pretty close to the seal, but the reality is that I was on a cliff above him and still a decent bit away from it. At no point could I have actually approached it (not that I would have) and at the first sign that it wasn’t totally comfortable with our presence (when I got an unexpected phone call), we packed up and headed away.

I phoned the sighting into NOAA and I emailed them copies of the images.

I’ll trade a whale encounter for a rare seal encounter any day!

Here’s a shot with the sun setting behind Kaho’olawe from the beautiful standpoint of La Perouse Bay.

Figuring that other people would have the same idea, when I was done with work, I headed over to Kite Beach to check out the kiteboarders. With my photo gear in tow, I fired away a ton of shots.

If you’ve never seen kiteboarders in action, it’s something to behold. If you get to Maui, be sure to head to Kite Beach in the afternoon and enjoy the crazy aerial acrobatics that these people bust out.

You can head over to my Underwater Photo Gallery for the 9 new images that I added.

Quick G12 Update:

Overall, I was VERY happy with the G12 in the Canon WP-DC34 waterproof case for the G12. There are two small issues that I have with it:

1. The “half press” on the shutter button to focus simply doesn’t give enough response through the waterproof case to know if you’ve successfully half-pressed it.

   When you do succeed, there’s usually a visual queue on the LCD, but this can be easy to miss both by not noticing it or by going straight past that and fully depressing the button.

   It’s possible that this will get sorted out as the housing gets “broken in” more — but it’s annoying to miss shots due to it.

2. I shoot A LOT in AV mode (aperture priority) mode – especially underwater. The dial in the front to let you set your aperture doesn’t have an exposed dial on the underwater housing. This means that you can’t change your aperture in AV mode after it’s already set.

   I don’t know if there’s another way to change it, but I haven’t found it. I’ll keep looking, but the fact that this one dial doesn’t have an exposed dial in the housing is very unfortunate.

But those two quibbles aside, I was both happy with how it performed and the photos that it took. Hopefully the shortcomings won’t be impossible to work around.

Despite owning a Canon 30D (which I use for my more “serious” underwater photography) and a Canon 5D mkII (which I use for almost everything else), I like keeping a point and shoot for situations when I don’t want to take all my gear — be it because I don’t want to take a bag with me to carry the camera or because we’re going to be snorkeling and my full underwater rig is 100% overkill.

Up until recently, the A710-IS has performed those duties very well. And when faced with the decision of what to replace it with, the Canon G12 quickly rose to the top of the list.

Even though I’ve only had it for about 2 days, here’s what I like about the G12:

• It can be used as a “real” camera with consideration given to manual settings
• All the options for those manual settings are very easy to access (many P&S cameras do have manual settings – but they’re VERY hard to get to making them almost unusable)
• The tilt & swivel LCD is really nice
• Natively shoots RAW without any wonky firmware hacks
• There’s a hot shoe (yes, this is awesome)
• The visual readout on the LCD is great – with lots of current settings displayed, a level and a histogram
• It takes a battery pack instead of a bunch of AA’s (some people like AA’s for the flexibility)

There are a few things that I don’t like, but most of them are very minor:

• The tripod mount isn’t centered over the lens (it’s centered relative to the camera body)
• The on-cam flash casts a shadow on close objects from the lens (not uncommon for many P&S cams)
• The G12 RAW files aren’t able to be read w/ CS4 – you need to upgrade to CS5 (not really a Canon problem, but worth mentioning)

Most of the images that I’ve taken have been just shooting around the house to get familiar w/ the camera. The real test will come tomorrow when I take the G12 out on a long snorkel trip.

If there are any good photos or if I run into any problems, I’m sure I’ll be posting about them soon.

The long story boiled down is that the ThickBox can find a “group” of images if you pass it common name in the rel param in your a tag. For instance:

<a href=”http://mikebrum.com/full_image.jpg” class=”thickbox” rel=”anyString”><img src=”http://mikebrum.com/thumb_image.jpg” /></a>

That’s simple enough. Any link that has the rel param set to “anyString” will be shown with Thickbox having “next” and “prev” links so you don’t have to view, close, open the next by hand. Very handy feature, for sure!

However, if the rel param happens to have a space in it, this appears to break completely, resulting in the image not being displayed. I’m sure there’s some degree of bug on Thickbox’s side, but I decided to fix it on the NextGEN Gallery side since that’s code I’m far more familiar with.

The fix is rather simple. In <your_WP_root>/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/lib/image.php, find the line:

function get_thumbcode($galleryname = ”) {

Immediately under that, add the following two lines:

 // Fix thickbox failure when $galleryname has a space in it
$galleryname = preg_replace( ‘/\s+/’, ”, $galleryname );

And that’s it. That strips the whitespace from the $galleryname variable which is what’s passed on to the code that populates the rel param in image links for Thickbox.

Just keep in mind that if you make this change on your server, your changes will be overwritten when you perform your next update — so make a note and be sure to apply this fix again after you upgrade.