SSDF workshop at Dyk-Leif in Sweden

June… great month, as it is mostly too early for plankton blooming, and summer is well up and running!
A good time for diving.

The entire group of Photographers wearing the Event T-Shirt.
The entire group wearing the Event T-Shirt. (C) SSDF

I had a lot too look forward to this month, as I had been invited to join a Photo event held by the Photo Committee from the Swedish Sportsdiving Federation.
Some years ago my good friend Ingvar Eliasson took over the Chairmanship, and together with a team, did a lot of positive changes. Now he has handed that post over to “UW. Photo enthusiast” Jennie Soriano, who continued the trend of setting up events and workshops. Something that seemed to please the members as they are well attended.

It was not new to me to be involved with doing something for the Swedish Federation, as I had previously been judging their annual National UW. Photo Championship. But it was the first time I had to join an event and spend time with all the active photographers, and I looked forward to it.
I had to do a talk on the night of arrival, and I chose to try to challenge them a bit – talking about the whole concept of taking pictures and how to evaluate what you do based on different parameters. I ended the presentation with an overview of lighting processes and different ways to look at lights and how to handle them. Overall I think I had their attention and got my message through 😉
The other nights the presentation were held by the very experienced guys: Anders Sälesjö and Ingvar Eliasson. Both showed very nice pictures indeed and passed on a lot of their long time experience to the audience. I got a lot of good ideas watching their presentations and was happy to use the weekend digging more into their view on the aquatic world.

The workshop was taking place in Hamburgsund, near the Swedish Weather Islands (Väderöarna) – at the resort “Dyk-Leif“… This is owned and run by Anders & Victoria that does a great job. Surely one of the most successful and well run resorts in the Nordic area. I have known them for many years, but it was more than 8 years since I had been there last… a lot had changed. They now had 2 kids and another on the way, more boats – and an even more smoothly run operation!
The great food had luckily not changed. Still wonderful Thai and Sea Food meals!

seafood

The long weekend were blessed with beautiful weather…. most days. We had a bit of wind but not enough to stop us from diving. The last day the clouds came in and blessed us with heavy rain. Thanks to Anders’  large catamaran boat we had good shelter and the diving was smooth!

Vaderoerne

I was fortunate enough to have a very experienced diver as buddy: Mikael Thulin. Micke also owned a D800 and had purchased a Hugyfot housing for it from me last year. So it was a lot of fun and a great learning experience for me to dive with a buddy that had the same equipment as me. During the weekend we exchanged lenses and ports and I had a lot of fresh input that I can use for myself later.

SubSee and D800
Micke Thulin diving his D800 with a SubSee +10 lens attached on the 105 micro Nikkor lens.

Overall I had 4 great days on the Swedish West Coast. The event was well planned and meeting everybody was a blast. Hope to be back again next year!
Note to self: “Get out of the office more often”…!  😉