In May The Australian Institute of Professional Photography held the Epson 2008 Tasmanian Professional Photographer of the Year Awards. With a record number of images and the largest number of photographers entering, the competition was fierce! Following a whole day of judging in a couple of categories (wedding and open) we retired for an evening meal where the winner was announced. To my total surprise, it was me! I took out the Tasmanian Professional Photographer of the Year Award for 2008

In April Adobe came to Tasmania from the US! I was excited and felt extremely privileged to be involved in an international project that brought together a small group of photographers from all around the world to capture amazing images and road test the new beta version of Adobe Lightroom2. Accompanying the photographers were a bunch of Lightroom engineers and every night we received instruction on the software which we all adopted for our own workflows. As we found issues, they were ironed out by the engineers (or we were shown what we were doing wrong!)

Waterbabies popularity continues to rise and now I have found a pool in which to base myself!

Recently I mentioned that I had converted one of my digital cameras into a black and white infra red. That means that the camera does not record visible light but only light that falls within the infra red spectrum, this information is then processed into black and white. Traditionally this was all obviously done with film.

 I have had a couple of dives on the Tasman Peninsula , still trying to get my new housing and strobes under control. The conditions for diving last week were great. I was lucky enough to share time with some other divers on the boat, one of whom fascinated me with a couple of stories regarding his own diving experiences with a couple of great white sharks!

WOW! What an amazing couple of days I have had. As a reward for working so hard last week and on the weekend, I treated myself to a scuba dive with my new camera. As you may have read, I have taken it for a few snorkels but never actually deeper than a couple of metres. So it was time to put the gear through its paces.