Stats – I owe a lot of thank you(s)
I shot 52k+ images in 2020 down from 72k in 2019. It’s just a number. When I shot slide film it was more like 3k per year. Film and developing cost money! Recently, I got a 256gb SD card on sale for $40. It will shoot tens of thousands of images. Free (almost! Followers of this blog – 996. It’s not a large number of people, relatively. I have been blogging since 2011. It’s an outlet for me to just post images past and present with some humor (maybe). I try to limit myself to 1 post a day. Jules taught me that too much is not good. Politics in recent months were too outrageous to ignore, hence a second post for a while. What amazes me is the breadth of my audience around the world (see views per country). The internet has me connected to the world. Thousands have visited this blog. Positive waves, I try to be positive (except the recent past politics) about the things I have photographed. I remain a staunch advocate for cameras – real ones – though I have recently reluctantly admitted Jules new iPhone 12 is pretty good. Meanwhile to all you visitors to this blog, near and far – Thank You! – for visiting. I apologize once more for not thanking each of you personally when you visited. Yes, this is the (in)famous Beef Wellington, Yorkshire pudding Xmas dinner – first time we made it and first time we ever ate it. (P.S. I don’t think my kids are following this blog, so anything goes.)
Stats
Selfie. It’s a wrap. I’m not bragging. It’s been an incredible journey.
Dives: 399 – Minutes: 25877 – Hours: 431 – Images this year: 21834 – Total four years: >50,000 images
I have logged 399 dives. Darn, just one short of 400. I did not log early dives nor training dives. That would be about six months until I got a dive computer. Some dives were short, maybe 30 minutes. And the longest was in excess of 100 minutes, 109 on a recent dive. I got better at air management. The average dive was about 64 min. This year I dove a lot and took 21, 834 images with a Canon G7. I have used a Canon G11, two Canon G12’s, and three Canon S100’s. Basically, I used three housings. I have two strobes. Redundancy was a must. Saudi has very limited access to equipment and supplies. All my stuff was largely brought from the US. I traveled with extra everything – batteries, memory cards. I always had a flashlight for unexpected night dives. I often had an extra camera housing – just in case. I have had about any camera problem you can think about. So be prepared. Everything fails. It’s a bit like wedding photography. You have two of everything. It’s a rule. Something always happens. I saved my buddy the other day. His memory card was full. I have forgotten to load my memory card. It’s better than forgetting to turn on your oxygen. But, I’ve done that too. (Ask your buddy to turn you on.)
There were three fantasy things I wanted to do in life. Dive. Fly. (I flew with a buddy in a Bell 47 helicopter.) And parachute. Two out of three ain’t bad. And I got to do both extensively. I’d have liked to have done one more night dive. And there are pictures in my head that I never got to image. Four years on the reef and I still saw something new on the last dive. I went into the water never expecting to make statistics. Fun, learning, pushing my personal limits – when the fork in the road came, I took it.
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