Diver Dennis
Contributor
We are in Ubud Bali after a wonderful 12 days in Tulamben, encompassing the 2006 Bali Photo Workshop presented by Photo Pros Mike Veitch from Yap, also a member of SB and Tim Rock from Guam, another well known photographer from Guam who writes and takes pictures for all the Lonely Planet diving guides.
We stayed at Scuba Seraya, a small and luxurious sea side resort just 2 kilometers from Tulamben. The resort staff and facilities are first class, with outstanding muck diving right out in front of the resort's beautiful black beach, the Secrets dive site. Catering to small groups of divers gives you the opportunity for truly personalized service and Scuba Seraya did not disappoint. They had 3 boats at our disposal for the entire week long course and we dove a lot of amazing sites including the famous Liberty wreck. Thanks to Michael Cortenbach for all the amazing footage of the Molas and for organizing your resort so well for so many photographers.
Each day of the course we did 2 wide angle dives in the morning followed by lunch and lecture time, then an afternoon macro dive with critiquing afterward and an optional night dive. The diving? Some of the best I've had with a huge range of sites and creatures to shoot. All of us had a LARGE portfolio of great shots by the end of the week.
Mike and Tim were great teachers and took the time to go through everything from the basics of f-stop and shutter speed to strobe placement and on into Photoshop techniques, basic and advanced. We were also given a copy of iView Pro, a great program for cataloguing and organizing your photos as well as making HTML pages and slide shows for the web. The improvement in all of us was seen in the slide show of all our best photos on the last night when all participants received prizes from the sponsors including a $500 gift certificate from Aquatica which Kim, an American living in Thailand was lucky enough to win.
We all had a terrific time, meeting other diving novices from around the world and leaving with a lot more underwater shooting skill than we came with. Bali is a wonderful and SAFE place to come and we will certainly be back, maybe at the course here next year.
We are off in another day to shoot the Mola Mola or Sunfish that appears around Lembongan the same time every year. I'll post a few pictures now but there will be many more to follow when we get home from Asia in December. Thanks Mike and Tim, as well as the staff of Scuba Seraya Resort for such a fun and informative week.
We stayed at Scuba Seraya, a small and luxurious sea side resort just 2 kilometers from Tulamben. The resort staff and facilities are first class, with outstanding muck diving right out in front of the resort's beautiful black beach, the Secrets dive site. Catering to small groups of divers gives you the opportunity for truly personalized service and Scuba Seraya did not disappoint. They had 3 boats at our disposal for the entire week long course and we dove a lot of amazing sites including the famous Liberty wreck. Thanks to Michael Cortenbach for all the amazing footage of the Molas and for organizing your resort so well for so many photographers.
Each day of the course we did 2 wide angle dives in the morning followed by lunch and lecture time, then an afternoon macro dive with critiquing afterward and an optional night dive. The diving? Some of the best I've had with a huge range of sites and creatures to shoot. All of us had a LARGE portfolio of great shots by the end of the week.
Mike and Tim were great teachers and took the time to go through everything from the basics of f-stop and shutter speed to strobe placement and on into Photoshop techniques, basic and advanced. We were also given a copy of iView Pro, a great program for cataloguing and organizing your photos as well as making HTML pages and slide shows for the web. The improvement in all of us was seen in the slide show of all our best photos on the last night when all participants received prizes from the sponsors including a $500 gift certificate from Aquatica which Kim, an American living in Thailand was lucky enough to win.
We all had a terrific time, meeting other diving novices from around the world and leaving with a lot more underwater shooting skill than we came with. Bali is a wonderful and SAFE place to come and we will certainly be back, maybe at the course here next year.
We are off in another day to shoot the Mola Mola or Sunfish that appears around Lembongan the same time every year. I'll post a few pictures now but there will be many more to follow when we get home from Asia in December. Thanks Mike and Tim, as well as the staff of Scuba Seraya Resort for such a fun and informative week.
Good luck in Tulamben finding the Mola Mola...I did five dives and didn't see any 
