When you need to enlarge a section of an image or make a large print, the resoluton may not be adequate.  The solution is a Photoshop Plug-in from www.alienskin.com called Blow Up.  When you enlarge images with Blow Up, jaggies that normally appear in enlargements are not visible - even with extreme enlargements up to 3600%.  Wow!  If you have an image that is not very sharp, you can use Blow Up to change the size and then use maximum sharpness on the image.
     Alien Skin Blow Up supports many features used by advanced Photoshop Image Editors. These include non-destructive resizing, multi-layers without flattening, resize image or create new image, it suppports several color modes, 8 thru 32 bit images, and the new multi-processors.  You can even add slight grain effects to your digital image if you prefer the film-look. 
Alien Skin BlowUp lists at $199 and is available for both Windows and Macintosh.

     Western Digital makes photo dive travel a breeze with the new Passport external hard drives.  These drives range from 60 to 250 gigabytes and weight just a few ounces.  They work from a USB2 cable that is supplied with the drive.   No more burning CD or DVD's on a dive trip.  Just take two or three of these very inexpensive drives and downloading your digital camera files becomes a snap.  We reccommend downloading your images to two of the drives, and keep the third for backup of your computer or in case one of the two main drives fail.  Prices range from less than $100 up to 200.  For more info goto www.westerndigital.com.

     One of the biggest problems on dive trips is charging batteries.  Standard volt meters will give you a false impression that your battery is charged.  The best and only way to insure you have a full charge is with a Pulse Load battery tester as show on the left.  This tester can meaure all types of batteries and give you an accurate reading of how much the battery is really charged.  Stop losing shots because your battery died in the middle of the dive.  You can purchase the ZTS Pulse Load tester from http://www.ulcs.com/ and go to the What's New tab at the top of the screen.  This is a must have item for all photo dive trips.