Photo Adventures with Curiosity and Learning

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The Trip

We left Charleston about 7am and flew to Houston - with a slight detour to avoid a storm. There we changed flights to the Continental flight to Cozumel (CO 1937), arriving about noon. After the usual hassle with government tour guides, we arrived at the Coral Princess Hotel. The surprise that after walking past the pool, you found yourself on a 20 foot coral ledge with some of the most wonderful coral, fish, octopi, eels, crabs, urchins, etc that I have ever seen. Here are the GPS track to Cozumel and the return. If you notice the small 20 mile ovel just south of western Louisiana border over the Gulf - that was our holding pattern. We eventually stopped at Lake Charles for additional fuel - then back to Houston and finally home to Charleston. Impressions? Eight days in Cozumel in late August - is a wonderful way to have a quiet time with the water and find new friends.

Photo Technical Information

All photos were made with an Olympus 4040z using the Olympus PT-010 underwater housing. I ran the camera with the monitor on, autofocus on, flash fill and with a 128 Mb memory, got 130 images without exhausting 4 rechargable AA batteries (1800 or 2200 mAhr). A simple, vanilla setup, but with too many options. So this photos reflect trying various combinations of flash intensity, color correction, macro on, fill flash (on/off), automatic speed and aperture selection, or manual aperature (6.3 - to get better depth of field). Post processing was done with GIMP, v 1.2.3 running under RedHat Linux 9.1 (beta). Photos were made either along the reef behind the Coral Princess, or on a dive at Palancar Gardens (about 70 - 80 feet).

The flights to and from Cozumel

The Location: Coral Princess Hotel

The Coral Princess - from the terrace beside the sea

From our balcony - the sea and the coral reef

Looking to the left of the hotel - towards Cozumel city

Looking to the right of the hotel

Each afternoon we congregated here for a little liquid refreshment with corn chips and super salsa (chopped onion, hot pepper, tomato and silantra).

A dinner serenade during happy hour (2 for 1, guess what?) with music from the group (17 Mb quicktime)

Some evenings, often during a terrace dinner or happy hour, a school of dolphins would swim in front of the Coral Princess

An typical evening sunset

Another typical evening sunset from the terrace - Xcaret and Cancun in the distance

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

C. Frank Starmer

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