They said that Egypt has the best diving in the world!  Well I'm sorry if I'm one of the few who disagree... I've only dived in a few places, namely Northern Ireland (too bloody cold), Florida, Australia (Barrier Reef - East Coast North to South) and now Egypt - Sharm El Sheikh.  My recollections of the Barrier Reef may be somewhat tainted by age now but I still remember the vivid colours, frantic marine life and crystal clear waters.  So if any of you are undecided between where to blow all your holiday budget then my advice is go to Oz.  I've posted all of the decent (or as decent as a crap photographer with the aid of a digital camera and an elaborate/expensive housing with minimal functionality and sore bloody fingers can manage - more about that later).  These are the pick of the bunch..

The remainder of the pictures are the pick of those that you can actually discern what the subject matter was!  All 15 of the pick of the bunch pictures are repeated in here - but at least you get to see what order they were taken in, these are my very first experience with a digital camera underwater and I personally could not work out why my picture quality per photograph taken ratio did not improve through the week.  With the 250 pictures taken, I have posted 64 here.  Without being pedantic I would say that was about a 1 in 5 ratio, I was told that even if I got 1 good picture out of a 32 exposure film then that was good going.  If I'm being too hard on myself then I can only try and explain how painful it is to miss out on a brilliant dive because I have my face glued to the lense looking for the crucial shot!  Then it comes along in the way of a massive Napolean Wrasse which forms a fantastic picture - I fin like a washing machine on the 1800 spin cycle to get some good distance between the camera, the Wrasse and my fellow divers... I line up to take the shot and it's perfect... I click the button just as the wrasse has passed the divers moving from the right of the frame to the left and you can see the proportionate size of this magnificent fish against the divers.. then nothing.. panic.. 2 seconds later the camera takes the shot.  Forgive me if I say this but my words could be clearly heard even underwater 'you f%!*^ing bast*rd' as the wrasse changes direction and heads right for me just in that 2 second window.   The digital camera has a little not so well known trait - Kodak camera's allegedly even more so... you take a picture and expect it to go straight away right?  Nope, nil, nadda, wrong, whaaa - get the idea! What happens is that you click the shutter release button on the camera and then about 2 seconds later the camera actually takes the picture... never noticed it before?  Well that would be because you have not had to stay perfectly still in a large body of water with nothing to stabilise you before and the subject was dashing from left to right whilst you were trying to maintain depth, position with current and everything else.  Anyway - take a look at the pictures below and see what you think.  I am impressed with these pictures - even more so the one's above... they are not award winners by any stretch - but they are guaranteed untouched with no enhancements.  There should have been 250 pictures posted here - but that's the way it goes I guess.