DON'T GO DIGITAL WITHOUT THIS BIBLE
Photography was never going to be easy. I started with a three-year diploma course, but it took years of hard knocks before I became proficient, especially under water. Then, just as I thought I'd got the hang of it, digital imaging came along to provide new gaps in my knowledge.
     Every man and his dog seemed to know a little about it, but it took a long time to sort out hard facts from the techno-babble of those who knew far less than they'd have others believe.
     Once actual image-gathering went digital, everyone got a digital camera, me included. I found myself hunting for answers that were again not immediately obvious.
     I think I've finally reached the point I could have reached five years ago had all the information been collated in one convenient place. But you don't have to go through such a painful process. Simply get hold of The Essential Guide to Digital Underwater Photography by Michael Aw.
     The author has wasted no words on the pretentious nonsense that is so often a feature of weightier tomes on underwater photography. This modest A5 volume has fewer than 130 pages but is packed with pertinent information.
     It's as if Aw's brief was to tell you all you need to know, yet packaged in such a way that you could take it all in on a single airline flight. Check in at Heathrow and by the time you get to Egypt you'll know your stuff!
     And this is not merely a conversion job for those who already know how to use an analogue camera, the posh term for a conventional wet-process film camera. Michael Aw takes us from the top of Page One, through photo-basics such as getting a good exposure and lighting, right through to the subtleties of the digital darkroom.
     And there is no pontificating. For example, he explains exposure in terms of cows through a gate. The lens aperture is the size of the gate and the shutter speed is how long the gate is open!
     I like such simple statements as: "Higher resolution does not mean better quality" and such explanations as the difference between a CMOS and a CCD sensor (I never knew that). Aw distils all his knowledge into a simple set of rules.
     Do you know the difference between shooting in JPEG, TIFF and RAW formats? You will after only a few minutes with this book. And, granted that RAW is best, what do you do with a RAW file after gathering the image?
     I had to get an expert to show me how to use Adobe Photoshop CS. I was very impressed with this comprehensive tool, but decided to write down the few procedures I was actually likely to use. I could have saved my time Ð Michael Aw has done that too!
     This part of the book applies equally well whether you've gathered your pictures digitally or work with digitally scanned pictures taken on film.
     Criticisms? None! This book sits beside my dedicated digital-imaging Mac as a ready reference.
John Bantin

DEEP BLUE DREAMS DVD
If you ever had a moment's doubt about why you go diving, a product guaranteed to lay those doubts to rest is the double DVD of Deep Blue, the big-screen offshoot of the BBC's Blue Planet series.
     Deep Blue takes the most ravishing sequences (with others not before seen) from the 7000 hours of footage shot for the TV series. It presents them in a way that puts the accent less on education, more on celebrating the wonder of the oceans.
     David Attenborough's narration is replaced by an understated commentary by actor Michael Gambon (scripted, incidentally, by Tim Ecott, who writes elsewhere in this Review section).
     Way up in the mix is George Fenton's spine-tingling score, which is played by the Berlin Philharmonic and is almost worth the price of the DVD alone.
     The result is a raw emotional spectacle. Divers usually experience wildlife on a rather more modest scale - these are rare encounters and my spine is still tingling.
     You are probably already familiar with many of the individual sequences - the Sardine Run, the tuna/marlin/sei whale/baitball feast; orcas taking sea-lion pups at the water's edge, as others hunt down a grey whale calf; the polar bear v the beluga whales; sharks feeding by night; projectile emperor penguins; and the deep-sea "black smokers" among others.
     Comical crabs and chilled-out jellyfish help to relieve the tension, and this 90-minute visual feast is packaged with a wealth of "how did they do that?" material - the 50-minute The Making of Deep Blue, extensive directors' commentaries from Alastair Fothergill and Andy Byatt, and various other goodies. There's no excuse for missing this DVD off your Christmas list.

MONTY'S NEW WORLD ORDER
Monty Halls - known to readers as expedition leader of Full Circle Expeditions - has now produced Dive - The Ultimate Guide.
     Halls describes the book as a "labor [sic] of love" although, given that he is English and the book is published here, I don't understand why American spelling creeps in.
     The scope of this book is huge - it even has a chart giving the relative volume and depths of the world's oceans. Comprehensive information on each destination's best diving season and the expected visibility are also provided. At the back of the book is a useful list of diving clubs and marine conservation organisations.
     Most readers will be more interested in the choice of diving sites, which cover most of the usual suspects, with a few surprises thrown in.
     Alongside the Red Sea (Thistlegorm, the Brothers, Sha'ab Rumi), he features Brazil's lesser-known Fernando de Noronha. In Australia he is not content to stick to the Barrier Reef but also features Ningaloo on the West Coast and the Neptune Islands to the south.
     British sites include Scapa, Porthkerris and Lundy. Some choices veer towards "odd", such as Lake Malawi, which I know Monty enjoys. I suspect few divers would go there just to dive.
     There is probably not enough information on any one destination for the book to merit the "ultimate" tag, but Halls has produced a very useful tool as a starting point for planning many trips. Like any guide that tries to span the globe, it will appeal to divers' aspirations rather than being a traveller's handbook.
     The Ultimate Guide is heavily illustrated with work from many well-known photographers and the design is clean and appealing. This will make a very good gift for any diver with wanderlust.
Tim Ecott

RAGGED IN EVERY WAY
Joining the written word with moving pictures is a good idea. If only the execution had matched the concept.
     The book Raggie Sanctuary was originally produced in Spanish, I assume, as it is published in Madrid. Sadly, the translation is so poor that it reads like Fawlty Towers' Manuel speaking English.
     Also, there is confusion over the name of the shark - accurately called "raggie" in the title, an abbreviation of the local name "raggedtoothed shark". These fearsome-looking, yet docile, animals are also commonly called grey nurse or sand tiger sharks.
     Science knows them as Carcharias taurus and they come to Aliwal Shoal close to Durban every year in the South African summer.
     I don't know if it's a translation error, or whether in Spanish they are called bull sharks, but this book swaps between calling them raggies and bulls. Bull sharks are completely different and also called Zambezi sharks in South Africa, but to call the raggedtooth by the common name of another is misleading.
     Many of the images in the book are fairly poor, too. They appear to be video grabs, so lack colour, contrast or detail.
     The title means little, anyway. This is a book about a holiday to South Africa and includes general dives (such as the wreck of the Produce) as well as the raggie dives and even white shark cage-diving and land-based activities.
     The accompanying DVD is far from professional. Footage is jerky and poorly lit and directed. It looks like the raw result of someone taking a video camera under water with no idea of what they would be filming. The musical score is predictable African souvenir music. Raggies deserve better.
Gavin Parsons

THE HUMAN TORPEDOES
During this year's TV coverage of the D-Day celebrations, one group of men who were on those beaches long before the rest of the Allied assault troops got little mention.
     These were the Royal Navy's "human torpedoes", the charioteers sent in early 1944 to survey invasion landing points. Working by night, they recorded on their slates the slopes and gradients of beaches and the positions of "hedgehog" obstructions, pillboxes, minefields, anti-tank ditches and sandbanks. Their reports proved vital in the storming of Fortress Europe.
     TV can't cover everything, but Chariots of War by Robert Hobson pays full tribute to both the British and Italian frogmen of World War Two.
     Hobson's book got off to a dream start. He was clearing out the family home following his father's death when he found a small suitcase. His father, Lt-Commander RS Hobson, had never mentioned to his son his deep involvement in WW2 naval frogman operations. Documents that spilled from the case were stamped "TOP SECRET" in red letters.
     This was 1990, and the start of years of research. RS Hobson had commanded the combined Italian and British chariot operations after the Italian surrender in 1943. His son tracked down survivors of the British charioteers then tapped the memories of the Italian frogmen - who called their steeds "pigs" and who, earlier in the war, carried out daring underwater raids against British warships.
     In his foreword the Duke of Edinburgh credits the author for "the fascinating history of this form of underwater warfare and for creating the special exhibition in the Eden Camp Museum near Malton".
     He recalls that he was serving in HMS Valiant as a midshipman only months before the Italian Navy human torpedoes scored "such a remarkable success in sinking her and HMS Queen Elizabeth in Alexandria Harbour in 1941".
     This heavily pictured and very detailed account of this war under water makes good reading for today's divers, even if most of us will be shocked by their primitive gear and the terrible conditions endured.
Kendall McDonald

SPLIT BETWEEN PRINT AND PIXELS
Is the day of the complete diving guide in book form nearly over? Probably not yet, but the breakdown of these valuable information books into two separate operations has already started. First you read the book and then, for the guts of diving information, you have to consult a website.
     An example is The Shipwrecks off North East Norfolk, and for this paper-and-web split you can blame author Stephen Holt, who shelters under the pen-name of Ayer Tikus.
     In March I reviewed his first book, The Shipwrecks off North Norfolk, and wrote that it filled a big gap in wreck-diving literature, listing 150 wrecks with diving detail and pictures or silhouettes of the ships.
     I expected to be able to say something similar about the follow-up, but while it is valuable for the details of 250 ships, pictures and silhouettes, all the diving detail is missing.
     Stephen Holt is not a diver, and such detail in his previous book was credited to local divers, but this time you have to go to his website to find it for each wreck.
     Holt says this is because "any report on a wreck becomes out of date within a few months", and he can keep the website up to date. Even so, I think this division devalues the book for wreck-divers. What happens if they, while at sea, have to change from the wreck which they had checked out online to another some distance away?
     I'm afraid the idea that a wreck changes appreciably "within a few months" does not fit my experience, and I would like to see the diving detail restored in the next edition.
     Only then will this otherwise excellent book fill another big gap in wreck-diving literature.
Kendall McDonald

WHERE OLD VESSELS GO
Few of us will have thought much about what author Michael Stammers calls the "afterlife" of ships in his book End Of Voyages. But he has, and the result is the first book to tackle the question: what happens to a ship when it is no longer needed for its original purpose?
     He has travelled widely to discover ships which have been in accidents; others left to rot; others broken up for scrap; those that have been preserved as historic; and others converted to new lives as floating warehouses, hotels, training ships or even prison hulks (or more modern floating prisons).
     Heavily illustrated and well written, this is a fascinating wander though the shipping of the past 2000 years. Divers will keep bumping into names of vessels they know well, as well as many they don't.
     Another good read from Tempus is Boats and Shipwrecks of Ireland by Colin Breen and Wes Forsythe, though you might be put off by the back-cover description of it as a "broad introduction to the archaeology of vessels in these waters by reviewing the types of evidence available and presenting a survey of past work in this field".
     Don't be alarmed. It's true that there are some crashingly boring writers among maritime archaeologists, but Colin and Wes, both divers, are not among them. They work at the Centre for Coastal and Marine Research at the University of Ulster and have produced an excellent, well-pictured book that all wreck-divers should enjoy.
Kendall McDonald

THE REAL THING
As much as people try to portray diving as adventurous, very often these days it isn't. You board a charter boat with 20 other people and get taken to a dive site that's been visited a million times before, and picked clean by everyone before you. And that's while you're being led by a divemaster who still uses acne cream.
     In short, diving these days is a little tame. We need a lesson or two from those who started when George Michael was still in Wham and Frankie Goes to Hollywood were telling everyone to relax.
     Enter wreck guru Rod MacDonald, and his book Into the Abyss. For divers who started diving when BSAC clubs were full of men with more facial hair than Dave Lee Travis, when the RIBs were actually Zodiacs and, if you hired a hardboat, it came with a lovely smell of fish from that morning's catch, this book is a trip down memory lane.
     For those of you who didn't know a time before mandatory life-rafts, back-lifts, wing systems and nitrox, this will be a revelation.
     Six months' pre-training before getting in the water, panic-stricken first boat dives, awe-inspiring virgin wreck dives - this book has the lot. MacDonald really was on a voyage of discovery, and he shares it in intricate detail, as if he was sitting beside you, telling the story in person.
     The level of detail is incredible, and unless the author kept a well-crafted diary, some of the descriptions must be embellished, but that's not important. All the essence of diving at the cusp of the technical revolution is here. Forget biographies by 20-something pop stars or TV actors with mediocre lives; this is the life of a man who was out there pioneering and discovering.
     Set in his native Scotland and in various places across the world (Chuuk, Bikini Atoll and Singapore to name a few), this book allows the reader to share every experience, both under water and above, as the author moves from deep-air diving to trimix - the scares, the mistakes, the thrills, enjoyment and even the mundane.
     Some of the descriptions are repetitive, or a little simplistic for experienced divers, but they are invaluable for newcomers and non-divers who want to read about an extraordinary life. This book is utterly marvellous and deeply interesting.
Gavin Parsons