PHOTOGRAPHIC ASSISTANCE
you bought a digital underwater camera, but are you getting the best out of it? Master Guide to Digital Underwater Photography explains in simple terms how to get great pictures. It covers problems encountered by divers with a camera under water, and discusses the difference between shooting electronically and on film.
Jack and Sue Drafahl explain the components of a digital camera and what the menu controls are all about. They go on to cover photography both by available light and with flash, wide-angle photography and close-ups, both macro and super-macro. Composition is dwelt on, and there are tips for travelling with your camera. It's a complete underwater photography course!
So you've taken lots of lovely underwater photographs. What will you do next? Whether you shot electronically or on film, your pictures will need to be digitised if they are going to proceed any further. Digital Imaging for the Underwater Photographer, written by the same couple, covers the process from input to output, which includes scanning film, digital image enhancement techniques and permanent storage.
It covers a lot of what you can do using Photo-shop, and things you may not have considered, such as colour-balancing your monitor. Not only that, but it's written in a language I can understand! Engrossing.
John Bantin

SUPERIOR COFFEE
Every time I see a new, glossy coffee-table book filled with underwater pictures, I have to ask: "Is there really a need for it?" After all, more than enough such books have already been published. Why this one, in addition to those already taking up space on my coffee-table?
Well, Out of the Blue by Paul Horsman is full of excellent photography of all the animals that divers get excited about, from sharks and whales to macro. Overall, the standard of photography is well up there with all the other coffee-table picture books, though there are one or two shots that are less than technically perfect, and I am surprised they made it through the picture-editing stage.
To find the difference, you have to look beyond the photographs to the supporting text. While many coffee-table tomes are pictures and captions, in Out of the Blue the text is more extensive. It's about a 50/50 split between text and photographs, and written for readability and solid content, rather than getting bogged down in flowery self-indulgence.
This is a coffee-table book that you can pick up to enjoy a good read and learn something worth-while in the process. Though you would need to sit up to read it - it's just too big to read in bed.
John Liddiard

JUST WHAT IT SAYS ON THE COVER
There are many books that describe themselves as "lavishly illustrated", but in the case of the Collins Field Guide: Sharks of the World there can be no argument whatsoever.
It is exceptional in this regard, with Marc Dando's artwork more than doing justice to the 453 shark species included in the book.
This initial impression of fastidious attention to detail is reinforced once the reader gets stuck into the book, with a splendid introduction covering the ancestry, life history, and physiology of the shark, followed by a species-by-species breakdown covering areas such as distribution, behaviour, and biology.
I thought my knowledge of sharks was pretty good until I read this book, but I was constantly surprised at the nuggets I picked up as I bowled through the text - aided throughout by diagrams, sketches and beautiful colour pictures.
If "lavishly illustrated" fits, I'd also say that (certainly as far as field guides for non-scientists go) "definitive" is also a pretty fair description.
If you are interested in sharks - and, let's face it, most divers are - this excellent book is a must.
Monty Halls

DEEPER INTO MALAYSIA
We all recognise whale sharks, but what was that odd fingernail-sized animal that seemed to be interesting everyone?
A Diver's Guide to Underwater Malaysia - Macrolife helps you to solve such riddles in more than 460 densely packed pages of text and photographs. Not only does it help identify the critters, but it also gives useful tips on how to photograph them.
The compact digital camera, able to shoot in super-macro mode, has fed a boom in interest in tiny subjects. Crabs, shrimps, nudibranchs, frogfish, gobies, blennies, pipefish and seahorses are the new obsession.
The photos are as colourful as the subjects. They may have been taken within the territory of Malaysia but the subjects are found throughout most of the Indo-Pacific region.
Within Malaysia, Sipadan and Layang Layang are well-known, but many other parts are little known yet equally exciting. Diving in Malaysia is a guidebook that covers places you have heard of, and a lot you have not.
Naturally it is illustrated with lots of lush photos. Essential information about each dive site is laid out in an easily assimilated format, including location, depths and currents. The section I found most useful, often overlooked in other guide-books, was on how to get to each place. That's very useful if you are coming via Kuala Lumpur.
Author Kurt Svrcula also gives guidance to photographers, including whether he considers each site to be best for wide-angle or macro camera set-ups.
John Bantin

SURPRISE, SURPRISE!
Hey, what's this? Can it be - a professionally written thriller about diving? The last diving novel I reviewed was bogged down in lengthy expo-sition, like so many before it, but Double Cross, by new British writer Patrick Woodrow, is well-plotted, taut and pacy. You get to the end of one short chapter and, guess what, you just have to read the next one! That's a thriller for you.
Based on a quest for sunken gold beyond our wildest dreams (OK, sounds familiar, I know), the book chronicles the efforts of underwater photo-grapher Ed Strachan to claim the inheritance left him by his grandad while holding off murderous cops, gangsters and single mothers and, at the same time, keeping in with National Geo-graphic's picture editor.
We follow Ed and his friends from Curaçao via London to the Far East. It may not be real life, but it's all-out action, undemanding and the movie rights should be negotiated immediately. Pack it for your next trip.
Steve Weinman

THAILAND OUT OF TIME
It must be frustrating to publish a guide book, only to have events beyond anyone's control make some sections obviously out of date.
While the dive sites of the west coast of Thailand generally survived well, the Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 did trash Christmas Point, which Diving in Thailand describes as a "four to five star" dive.
Such glitches are disappointing, but excusable considering the circumstances. What is less excusable are other parts that are out of date.
I don't know Thailand as well as the authors do (or did?), but I do know that Fantasea Reef has been off-limits for the past five years. I also know that the first few Similan Islands are off-limits. Yet Diving in Thailand describes these sites with no mention of such restrictions.
Turning back to the introductory chapters, the photography advice mentions Nikonos cameras, no longer in production, yet fails altogether to mention digital cameras.
It makes me wonder: if I, with my limited know-ledge, can pick up such obvious examples of how Diving in Thailand is out of date, how much can we trust the rest of the text?
It's a shame, because the book is attractive and has accurate maps, and photographs of better quality than most guide books.
A clue lies in the first pages. This edition was published in 2004, but the first edition was published in 1994. It's an attractive book that was no doubt excellent 10 years ago. What a pity that the publisher skimped on updating it further for the current edition. John Liddiard

CORAL BEAUTY
This is no ordinary coffee-table dive book. General editor Jack Jackson has assembled an impressive list of contributors for what will be a valuable addition to most divers' libraries. Many readers will recognise names such as Lawson Wood, Michael Aw and Doug Perrine, just a few of those with regional expertise to have contributed.
Clearly set out, and with an introductory section covering natural history, ecology and ethical diving as well as technical and safety issues, Diving the World's Coral Reefs strikes a healthy balance between the aspirational and the educational. The quality of photography is extremely high.
I particularly liked the "Coral Gallery" chapter, which gives details of around 40 species of stony, black and soft corals, hydrocorals and gorgonians. This is a simplified overview of coral identification but, combined with the opening chapter, provides a strong introduction to coral biology.
While beautifully produced, this book does not ignore the reality of many of the world's most popular sites. For example, the section on the South-west Indian Ocean Islands (by Fiona Mcintosh) points out that the El Niño of 1998 and "overfishing, pollution and sedimentation" have taken their toll on the region's reefs.
Jackson also warns divers about perfecting their buoyancy, and gives clear guidelines on how to take photographs without damaging marine life.
Unlike some global guides, this book does not attempt to list operators and dive centres in those islands and countries mentioned. The regional and local maps are too small-scale to be really useful, but if you are planning a trip to a new region, the general information and geographical context make an excellent starting point for research.
The top local dive-sites are named, so anyone visiting a destination will know what to ask for when they arrive at the dive centre.
Tim Ecott

ROCK SOLID
For somewhere so small, Gibraltar has a wealth of diving, especially wreck-diving. In Underwater Gibraltar, Phil "Smudge" Smith and Darren Fa leave no rock unturned to cover the wrecks in detail, from the sizeable, such as Roslyn and Excellent, to the tiny, like the remains of an Italian chariot.
Even aspects about which some guides can be vague, such as how to find a particular wreck, are covered with meticulous precision. You could turn up in Gibraltar in a boat having never been there before, get the book out, and be confident of locating any dive site and diving it, given the right conditions.
Provided, that is, you don't arrive from Spain to find local red tape prohibiting you from diving at all. Permission to dive is just one of the victims of the tit-for-tat petty politics that the Spanish and Gibraltarian authorities insist on playing.
With the wrecks and reefs covered, Underwater Gibraltar adds chapters on diving skills and local marine life.
In both cases the information is concise and appropriate, never digressing beyond what is relevant to a local guidebook.
I dived with Smudge many years ago, the first time that I visited Gibraltar. It's good to see that his enthusiasm for his local diving is still going strong, bundled with more years of research and experience. Being the curator of the Gibraltar Museum must be his job sent from heaven.
It's also nice to see from the cover shots that Steve Warren, owner of Ocean Optics and a regular visitor to Gibraltar, still knows what to do from behind the lens.
This is a book that both Gibraltar regulars and newcomers won't regret adding to their bookshelves. The standard of diving information sets a target to which all guidebook authors should aspire.
John Liddiard

ANOTHER WORLD
Colours, Textures and Patterns of the Deep by Dos Winkl
(ACC Books, ISBN 1905377002).
Hardback, 240pp, £29.50
A door-stop of a book, this is an exercise by the Dutch underwater photographer in turning coral-reef macro photography into art - by getting so close to his subject that it becomes a colourful abstraction. The devil is in the detail, with lots of eyes, fins and polyps on view. Informative captions and comments by Winkl and Kali de Meyer keep it all grounded in reality, and the overall effect is of an enjoyable appreciation of the delicacy and complexity of the reef. But, like so many art books, it may stay on the shelf after the first browse.

MAKO SHARKS
by Alessandro De Maddalena, Antonella Preti and Robert Smith
(Krieger Publishing, ISBN 1575242672).
Hardback, 72pp, US $16.50
The Lamnidae family is widely feared, but these aren't wise-guys but mako sharks. This slim volume tells you far more than you probably want to know about them. Were you aware that the shortfin mako is the fastest of all sharks with a speed of 22mph, and can leap 6m out of the water? The authors take a scientific textbook approach, with lots of diagrams and measurements and quite a few pictures of dead sharks - partly because makos, as offshore hunters, are more often encountered by anglers than divers. But go for it if you're a mako maniac.

CURRENTS OF CONTRAST - LIFE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA'S TWO OCEANS
by Thomas P Peschak & Claudio Velasquez Rojas
(Struik, ISBN 1770070869).
Hardback, 200pp, Rand 275 (around £24)
A lovingly produced coffee-table book about the two coasts of southern Africa - the much-dived east warmed by the Agulhas system and the west, which includes the great white shark territory from Cape Agulhas to Cape Town and further north, fed by the Atlantic's cold Benguela flow. the book takes us through the life-forms nourished by these current systems, both in and out of the sea. More underwater photos from the east, including the Sardine Run, would have helped, but this may interest anyone who has dived in South Africa or plans to do so.

Complete Diving Manual
by Jack Jackson
(New Holland, ISBN 843308703).
Hardback, 192pp, £19.99
Independent "how to dive" manuals pop up every so often, and we're never quite sure about them. Most people learn to dive with a training agency that provides its own manuals to accompany the course. Generally these seem to have improved over time, so don't third-party guides just complicate matters? Jack Jackson and New Holland don't think so, and reckon this manual will be useful not only for neophytes but for advanced divers needing an information top-up. It whips through everything from Boyle's Law to rebreathers, and is well illustrated and indexed - your call!

Sharks
by Dr Geoffrey W Potts & Silja Swaby
(Collins Gem, ISBN 0007211716).
Softback, 254pp, £4.99
"Don't go swimming without it," it says on the cover, but don't put this book in your BC to read on stops, because it isn't waterproof. What it represents is a great little stocking-filler - a pocket-sized companion to Collins' grown-up Sharks & Rays book, with attractive colour illustrations by Sean Milne and bite-sized information on 200 of the shark and ray species that divers are most likely to encounter. Good stuff!

A Shore Diving Guide to New England
by Jerry Shine
(Blue Sphere Pubs, ISBN 097629530).
Hard/ softback, 198pp, £14
The coast from Connecticut to Maine on the eastern US seaboard is Jerry Shine's stamping ground, and here he guides us through 90 shore-dive sites in detail. There are no underwater photographs, just pictures of entry points. To be honest, a lot of the diving looks less than thrilling, and some of the sites are so similar that the descriptions have been cut-and-pasted. The words "nice dive" crop up a lot. If it never occurred to you to dive New England before, this probably won't change your mind. Mainly for residents.

Great British Marine Animals
by Paul Naylor
(Sound Diving, ISBN 0952283158)
Softback, 272pp, £15
This is the second edition of a book that, over the past two and a half years or so, has established itself as a bible for those UK divers who like to be able to put a name to passing wildlife. It is written in relaxed style by marine biologist Paul Naylor, and there is good reason to recommend this revised edition, because it includes 30 additional species and 90 more examples of Paul's often-excellent photographs. All sorts of creatures can be found here, from pogges to basking sharks - not forgetting "unusual action shots" of sea hares and starfish, which I never seem to notice getting up to much. Great animals, great value.

Reuter's old news
Another book about Scapa Flow? Surely there is nothing more to be said about the German Fleet and the Great Scuttle. My shelves hold more than a dozen books about the wrecks, starting with the great salvage exploits of Ernest Cox and running up to the present day, with its first-class diving guides to all the Scapa wrecks.
But if you think there is no more to be written, you underestimate the appetite of the real wreck diver. Beside me is yet another book, Scapa Flow from Graveyard to Resurrection, edited by Simon Mills.
Although I confidently predict good sales, the extraordinary thing is that this book contains no modern diving detail about the German wrecks at all, although there are some fine pictures. But every diver will want to know what actually happened to the German Fleet, and who better to tell us than the man who did the scuttling in 1919?
That man was Vice-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, who in 1921 wrote Scapa Flow: The Grave of the German Fleet, the definitive account of his reasons for giving the order to sink his ships. Simon Mills has put a new translation of that original account at the heart of his book, topping it with a readable life of von Reuter and tailing it with Ernest Cox's salvage exploits.
Although von Reuter is not given to gripping phrases, it is the sheer detail and his obvious emotion that will appeal to divers today. They will find many facts that add to their interest in diving Scapa.
Kendall McDonald

It's a gift!
If you dive in the UK and find marine life at least as interesting as wreckage, British Sea Life is the DVD about which to drop heavy hints this Christmas. It's head and shoulders above the usual offerings.
For somebody else's money, you'll get almost three hours of terrific underwater footage covering some 170 species. It's all neatly arranged in six sections - Rock & Sand, Shipwrecks, Soft Sea Floor, Open Water, Cliff Walls and Seaweed.
Go straight in to examine specific creatures; watch it an episode at a time; or indulge in a lengthy fish-fest and revisit bits later. A handy 16-page printed ID guide reminds you of what's on the DVD.
It's hard to fault this product - the music and effects are under-stated, the narration gently humorous and all the trimmings complement rather than obtrude on the stars of the show.
For 34-year-old Anita Sherwood, who spent 18 months travelling 15,000 miles and to 200 dive sites all over the UK to film, edit and produce the film, this was a remarkable labour of love.
When the next non-divers declare that there is nothing much to see in British waters, sit them down firmly in front of the TV and slip this film on. Once they've seen everything from bootlace worms to dolphins, fireworks anemones to seals, they will have enjoyed a thoroughly pleasant education.

Free interpretation
Feature film The Freediver went straight to DVD in the UK, so now all you freediving fans can enjoy it on your plasma screens. It's entertaining enough, and the underwater footage is quite spectacular, but this movie inspired by Greek free-diving princess Danai Varveri is nevertheless a bit of an oddity.
Danai specialises in the finless "natural weight" discipline, though she does not hold an AIDA-recognised world record, so is not well- known outside Greece. The Freediver, however, sees Camilla Rutherford, who plays Danai, shooting for the glory of an AIDA constant ballast world record ("every sponsor on Earth will beat a path to your door!"), as the dastardly manager of blonde US champion Maggie Stone plots to foil her bid. Without wishing to divulge the outcome, it deviates from Danai's real story by a mile.
Last year in the Greek isles, I was asked if I would like to meet a champion freediver. All I could see at that moment was what appeared to be a small child, her back towards me. She turned out to be Danai, a vivacious and clearly gifted diver. She was about to go for a new record but, unfortunately, suffered a shallow-water black-out on her ascent.
I also met Danai's doctor-mentor. He may have come over as mildly Svengali-like, but I wonder how thrilled he was by the Bond-villain image of his alter-ego Dr Viandes, as portrayed by Adam Baldwin in the movie?
Although The Freediver is filmed in English, and features actors of the quality of James Fox, it still somehow feels like a continental film with overdubbing. Alki David directed, and also plays Danai's coach and lover Hector. If he hoped to outgun Luc Besson's much-hypedBig Blue, he has probably failed, but freedivers will enjoy the images and the extra footage, which includes real freedivers Martin Stepanek (breaking a world record) and Fred Buyle (being rescued by scuba divers).

Red Sea loop
Half an hour of Red Sea marine-life footage, filtered through what would seem to be every piece of editing trickery known to computer, and wedded to a searing electronic soundtrack - that's Oceano.
There is no narrative or direction, just arty underwater images and noises. I suppose you could put it on continuous play on your TV, unless you feel that £16 is too much to pay for a fancy screensaver.
The stars, including grouper, turtles, sharks and dolphins, were filmed by Deborah Metcalfe over four years (not solely for this purpose, presumably). Loved the nudibranchs.