It wasn’t all work and no play while the U of W students were here. They had a little free time and some of them chose to dive and snorkel when they could.
Last Friday afternoon was one of those bits of time and as luck would have it, I had just received the housing for my new Olympus E PL-1, which is a totally sweet camera.
We had a couple of great dives and I got a few photos that I think are reasonable first efforts. Visibility was limited and I think that the camera / lens / strobe combo performed very well. The photographer needs a little work 
Here is a photo of the divers.
And here are a few photos of fish and coral, click on any of them to get a larger version. Check out the detail in the coral photo. The fish photos were taken at a distance and seem to be well focused. All of the photos were taken with the 14-42mm “kit” lens. I used the “P” mode for the trial run, with the ISO set at 200, none of the photos were taken as macros. You can see that I need to learn a bit more about handling the strobe.
We surfaced to flat calm water and a brilliant sunset!
Great to see Kosrae Village in the blogosphere! I enjoy reading blogs of interest to me and keep up with my favorites by putting them in an automatically updating list on my own. There are very few blogs updating out of Kosrae at present, yours is a welcome addition. Keep us posted, to the extent you are permitted to do so, on developments at Menka. I remain fascinated by Menka. The Menka kava culture is clearly that of Pohnpeian sakau: a large peitehl (stone), moahl (pounding stones), and Hibiscus tiliaceus squeezing wraps (wungwung). Lelu is clearly a different style of pounding and service, possibly sans H. tiliaceus, and using much smaller stones with grooves that apparently collected the kava (seka). The viscous fluid of Pohnpeian/Menka style sakau will not flow well down to groove in its thickest state, thus it may be that Lelu was using only a water emulsion. In any case, do keep us posted! My one unfulfilled dream in life might be to drink sakau from an ancient stone in Menka.
Love the post, look forward to reading more.