Assimilation Back to the United States

My tenure on Guam is quickly coming to a close. I'm leaving this Saturday to return back to the States for about 2.5 weeks - my longest stint on the mainland since I left for Guam. My replacement has been identified and secured, so I'll have a couple weeks of transition left in January before I'm done for good. I guess my blog will have a funny name at that point...

In thinking about my departure today, I realized I'd be going through a reverse culture shock coming back to the US. Off the top of my head, I'll have to remember:

• Sandals, a bathing suit, and a saltwater soaked t-shirt is not appropriate attire for any occasion
• When someone says a 9:00 AM meeting, they mean 9:00 AM - not 9:20 AM if they feel like showing up
• It is considered more dangerous to run a red light (for fear of being rear ended by the 8 cars behind you preparing to run the red light) than it is to stop at one
• People walk on the right side of halls and walkways (damn Japanese tourists)
• I no longer have to don football gear to exit an elevator due to the dangers of masses of Japanese tourists that think the elevator will go away if they let someone out before they get on
• Lines and queues do exist! Everything in life isn't a free for all, and you do have to wait your turn (I'm beginning to think Japan had a meeting and decided to do everything opposite the Western world just to confuse and annoy us)
• Gas prices didn't "plummet" to $3.20/gallon
• Snow isn't a mythical object you only hear about in the movies

I've mentioned before there will definitely be some things I miss - diving, the weather, and the ocean - but it's more than worth it to give that all up to be home for good. 

Lion(fish), Tiger (Tail Sea Cucumbers), and Bears (ok, no bears)! Oh My!

I'm going through a weird set of emotions here. My tenure in Guam is going to be over soon - possibly even as soon as two weeks from today (although that's pretty unlikely). I cannot WAIT to get back to the States and see my friends, family, and my amazing girlfriend. At the same time though, it's really freaking sweet living on a tropical island. There's just something about spending so much time on and near the water that just makes life so much better. Maybe it stems from growing up on Cape Cod and always being at the beach or on the water and it just feels like home. Or maybe it's being on the beach in December in a bathing suit, complaining about it being so hot. Either way, I've come up with a solution: SCUBA DIVE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

Since my last post on Thanksgiving, I've been on 10 dives. I have 4 more scheduled tomorrow. I have 6 scheduled next weekend, and I'll probably get in another 2-4 this coming week too, since I have Thursday off. I don't know what "Our Lady of Camarin" day is, and I don't know who Camarin is, but I like her. I may even try a night dive Wednesday night if I get really gutsy and I can sneak out of work early. If I have to come back to Guam in January, I'm going to get my Advanced Open Water certification. Well, more formalize it since I've actually done all of the prerequisite dives and skills.

As is becoming the theme with my posts, I'm putting up some pictures from my dives. I really love taking these pictures. I have been learning how to use my camera properly, and I've been learning a LOT about underwater photography as I go. I just wish I knew I'd be diving enough in the future to make it worth another couple hundred bucks to upgrade my set up a little bit. Maybe when I win the lottery...

I was less than 3 feet from the turtle, just swimming along side of it. SO COOL!

An Anemone's Mouth

There was a woman diving in a leopard suit. With a tail. Her husband (?) was dressed as the dude from Avatar. NERDS!

I went cave diving

Neat macro shot of some hard coral

Lionfish - A.K.A. Turkeyfish. Where was this guy on Thanksgiving?

Another neat macro shot of some soft coral

Clam

What do sharks and turkeys have in common?

This past Thursday was the first time in my life that I didn't spend Thanksgiving with family. In college, I always found my way home. After graduation, I either made the trek down to my parents in North Carolina, or I spent the holiday with my sister at my cousins house. Working in Guam made seeing my family impossible this year. That doesn't mean I didn't make the best of it though.

I started out the day as I have started out every day off from work - with some scuba diving. My first dive of the day was at Gab Gab 2. It gets it's name from the beach on the Naval Base - Gab Gab Beach. Gab Gab 1 is the first reef line, then Gab Gab 2 is the second one in about 40-120 feet of water.

Giant Trevally looking for food

At Gab Gab 2, a tourist company sets up feeding stations where they put tiny bits of squid in upside down buckets. This attracts some BIG fish - Giant Trevally and Orbicular Batfish. The Giant Trevally go crazy for the food and keep smacking the bucket trying to get a meal.

Nurse Shark

The squid attracts one more type of animal - nurse sharks. These are mostly harmless sharks, but they can still get pretty big. We saw maybe about a half dozen of them - although never more than two at a time, so maybe they were all the same ones. I got within 3 feet of one at one point.










The sharks were more scared of us than we were of them. It was hard to get close enough to get a decent picture since they'd swim away.

This guy was a little more bold. He swam right at me and only got scared about 3 feet away.

We found a really cool Rose Bubble Tip Anemone that was hosting a few Clownfish. This thing was absolutely beautiful. I got some halfway decent pictures, but they could've been better - I got some backscatter, unfortunately.








Our second dive of the day was to Gab Gab 1. I hit my deepest dive ever, going down to 87 feet - although that record would only stand for about 24 hours. We found a giant wall of anemones. It was incredible - I've never seen so many in one place before. The water was a bit cloudy, so unfortunately it messed up most of my pictures with backscatter. A couple highlights are below, but you can find all the pictures from Gab Gab 2 and Gab Gab 1 on my Picasa.

Later that day, it got to be the most important part of the day: Turkey time. One of my co-workers, Chris, who relocated to Guam for this project had won a frozen turkey in a Halloween costume contest. That spurred him and his fiancée, Kelli, to put on a full Thanksgiving dinner for us, our other relocated co-worker (Matt), and a couple of their Japanese friends. Everything came out absolutely amazing. Matt and I had a competition for eating the mashed potatoes. I won. Mashed potatoes are my domain and you do not challenge me.

As you can see, we had quite the spread. Kelli is finishing off the gravy while I'm anxiously awaiting digging in to the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes (not pictured), green bean casserole, and biscuits. There was obviously pumpkin pie to finish the meal.

This is my plate of food. What you're witnessing here is the perfect plate. Bold statement, I know, but just look how the foods all just work together. The turkey has the perfect amount of gravy, just drizzled about. The generous helping of mashed potatoes acts as a barrier between the green bean casserole and the stuffing. Everyone knows those can't touch. And the biscuit just adds that splash of golden brown coloration that every Thanksgiving plate must have.

Washed out in blue

Photography above water is hard. Why did I think underwater would be really easy to get great pictures? For the most part, I understand photography, shutter speeds, apertures, focal lengths, depth of field, and how ISO values affect a picture. I get how using an external strobe reduces "backscatter" underwater and how to position the strobe to prevent hotspots and prevent over or under exposure. I also understand general principles of photo composition - especially after reading so much about underwater photography. Putting all these theories into place though... wow. Forget that I'm using a simple point and shoot camera and it's impossible or incredibly difficult to adjust many of these settings to where they need to be.

One of the biggest issues you face underwater is the dilution of colors. First, a quick lesson in colors and light. The visible spectrum of natural light is made up of various shades of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo (some just consider this the border between Blue and Violet), and Violet. Red is the lowest energy and Violet is the highest energy. The color you perceive an object to be is the color of light that is reflected off the object. A red apple absorbs all colors except red. Red is reflected off the apple and gives it that nice delicious coloration. A black object does not reflect ANY color back to the eye, and a white object reflects ALL colors back to the eye. Now here's how this all relates to photography: Water absorbs light very quickly, and the deeper you go, the faster you lose the lower energy colors. Red is absorbed very quickly, and is no longer a visible color by about 15 feet. At 25 feet, Orange is gone, and by around 45 feet, you lose yellow. This is why so many underwater pictures you see are heavily tinted in a blue green. To make matters worse, those distances are an additive of both depth and distance. If the object is 25 feet deep and you're 15 feet away, the light has to travel 40 feet underwater to get to your eye. That's a lot of color loss very quickly.

In comes the external strobe. This is better than the built in flash of a camera for two reasons. One, it's more powerful. Two, since it is not directly next to the lens and since it can be angled in all sorts of ways, you can eliminate backscatter. Backscatter is those little particles that fly through the water. If you the light from the camera (strobe) isn't angled properly, they'll light up like a Christmas tree (see picture 2 below).

But beyond the composition, camera, and lighting issues, there's the biggest one of all to contend with underwater - and it has nothing to do with the actual picture itself. Buoyancy. When you're diving, you usually wear weights so that you sink. You'll put air into your buoyancy control device (BCD) so that you can stay at one depth in the water. So first you need to master that so you can try to stay still while taking the picture. The other problem is breathing. When you breathe in, you expand your lungs which then expands your body.You now weigh the same as before, but you're displacing more water and you're going to start floating to the surface. When you exhale completely, you'll start sinking again. You have to find that sweet spot in your breath where you're completely neutrally buoyant and you can actually stay still. Oh, and if there's a current underwater (which there is 99% of the time), you're screwed.

Picture 1. Fish Butt

My first ever picture underwater... the dreaded Fish Butt. This is a major composition no no. Who wants to see a picture of a fish's ass?

Picture 2. Backscatter

Here's a prime example of backscatter. On this day, there was a particularly high level of floating particles which made it all that much more difficult to avoid the backscatter. Paired up with it being my first time shooting underwater... my pictures were pretty much screwed.

Picture 3. Alien Invasion!

This dive was at Fish Eye Marine Park. There is an underwater observatory that lets people stay dry and see the reef. There is also reef "tours" that allow Japanese tourists to walk around the reef in these big helmets. I think they look like space people if you ask me.

Picture 4. If you look at it full size, it looks worse!

My macro photography clearly needs some work. The light exposure was good, but the focus sure does leave something to be desired. I have no idea why the macro mode on my camera doesn't seem to work well. It's supposed to be able to focus as close as around an inch or two.

Picture 5b. Strobe on low power

The next two pictures will show you the difference a strobe can make. This one is with the strobe at it's lowest setting. Look at how washed out and blue-green everything looks (yeah, the sea star is supposed to be blue).

Picture 5b. Strobe on high power

Now look at the difference turning up the strobe. Unfortunately, I probably turned it up one or two notches too high, or could have angled it a bit better. I've got a couple overexposed hot spots where the flash made things too bright. Notice how much more color you see in the photograph though, and how the sand doesn't look blue.

That's about enough for a photography lesson from someone who doesn't really know what he's talking about anyway. Now I'll just post up some other interesting pictures from my dives this past weekend. If you want to see all my diving pictures, just go here: https://picasaweb.google.com/114228026881935585471 - For now, I'll post ALL my pictures - Good, bad, and ugly. Out of focus and beautifully composed. That is until I burn through the free storage space Google gives me. That's likely to happen soon too, considering I've used half of it in 3.5 dives worth of pictures.

Picture 6. An attempt at being artistic

Picture 7. A sunken Amtrac (Amphibious Assault Vehicle from WWII)

Picture 8. Me with said Amtrac

Picture 9. Interesting rock formation

Picture 10. If only the focus was more crisp, this would've been an AWESOME picture

Picture 11. Those aren't puddles you see. This is actually underwater. I'm under a rock, and those are air pockets stuck to the rock from the air we were exhaling.

Picture 12. Fish hiding in and around a coral formation

Next we're going to hit probably the coolest section of pictures I took all day. I was able to swim right alongside a sea turtle and I got some pretty great pictures. Check all of them out on my picture website.

Picture 13. Sea Turtle

Picture 14. Sea Turtle

Picture 15. Sea Turtle

Picture 16. Sea Turtle - probably the best picture I got. Almost looks professional. Too bad its right front leg is blocking its face a little bit.

Picture 17. Sea Turtle

Picture 18. Tiger Tail Sea Cucumber. This thing looks scary. I wish I got better strobe coverage on it though.

Remember, you can see all my other diving pictures here: https://picasaweb.google.com/114228026881935585471