When I had Madang – Ples Bilong Mi moved to a new server a lot of things stopped working. One thing that I wanted to do again is Microsoft Photosynth scenes. If you missed my post on the subject and want to see what the fuss is about, click here.

Here is the original Photosynth scene of my office (messy, but convenient – I didn’t have to leave my chair):

The controls are easy to figure out. The only thing that’s not obvious is that you can press the “p” key on your keyboard and see the mathematical points that have been calculated to blend the images. Press “p” again to go back to the scene.

I have a lot of ideas for Photosynthy stuff. How about:

The cool thing is that it’s like a movie, but YOU get to decide where the camera is pointing and where the camera goes. You can navigate to any place where a picture was blended in and you can zoom in or out, turn around, walk the other way, go through doors (even closed doors!), or look right down at the cameraman’s feet (if he shot them).

Oh yeah, I’m going to be fooling around with this!

When I got up on Saturday morning and heard the rain on the metal roof of our house, I knew all was not well. We seem to be curiously blessed with an abundance of sunny Saturdays – even during the rainy season, of which we are in the middle.

I left my gear at home and went over to the dock to see if anybody would show up for a dive. A couple of hardy friends did show up, so we were off to Barracuda Point at Pig Island to check the conditions.

A current was raging. Since there were only two of us diving, we decided to swim for it.

At first, there didn’t seem to be much to see. All the fish were elsewhere. I fiddled with some bubbles and a Semperina fan coral:
Getting into the coral now, I shot this image of an Acabaria fan coral. If you click to enlarge, you can see the individual polyps:

This Ctenocella coral is a beautiful red colour and sways grasslike in the current:

I don’t know the identity of this sponge, but it is an example of how we often see one sponge growing on another. The tan coloured sponge appears to have a red encrusting sponge growing on parts of its surface:

Finally, some fish life! This baby Blue-Spotted Stingray (Dasyatis kuhlii) was hiding under a ledge. He is only about the size of a dinner plate:

I caught these Reticulated Dascyllus (Dascyllus reticulatus) hiding in their favourite coral (Seriatopora hystrix):

Here is a YouTube shot of the Dascyllus reticulatus swimming around a Acropora hyacinthus (I think!) coral:
The video quality is not as good as the original. I’m still trying to figure out how to get the best quality on YouTube. You can get the idea, anyway.

Finally, here is another shot of a White Bonnet Anemonefish (Amphiprion_leucokranos):

In approximately 2,000 dives in the area, this is only the second time that I have seen this species.  Given that all Anemonefish have a free-floating larval stage that must find an anemone in order to survive, it isn’t surprising that they may suddenly appear in places where they were not previously found.