I feel like I’ve done a lot of great things despite having diabetes. I’ve gone many places and had some wonderful experiences, but I think the most awesome thing I’ve done despite having diabetes is snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.

From the very beginning, when we started planning last year’s trip to Australia, we knew that we wanted to go to the Reef. And almost as soon, I started worrying about how my diabetes would affect our plans — just a little bit. Would I be able to swim without going hypo? How would I handle insulin delivery while I’m in the water or on the beach? Should I take some Lantus with me for the beach/reef part of our trip? Would the tour operators let me swim with diabetes? I hadn’t gone swimming in so long, and I had no idea whether I would even be strong enough to do it.

So we went to the pool three times a week, and I went from almost being unable to swim in September to swimming a mile each Saturday in April. My BGs weren’t so awesome before swimming, and I dropped like a rock during my evening visits to the pool. But I figured I would be conservative when we went to the Reef, and I decided to hope for the best, trusting in the months of swim+insulin practice.

Despite some dicey weather on the way from Cairns to Flynn Reef — we had high seas driven by 20 knot winds that led most people onboard to get very green (or worse) — we had a great time. The water was so warm, the coral was so intricate, and the fish! The fish were amazing. There were so many colorful varieties and so many of each kind. They were everywhere! We saw parrotfish, angelfish, clown anemone fish, and an enormous wrasse . . . just to name a few. At the second site of the day, we saw a giant clam and a sea turtle, which swam around at incredible speed. It was just so cool to swim over the top of the coral pedestal and then look down to see it drop away dozens of feet into the darkness.

When it comes right down to it, the reef was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had, and it came as part of one of the most wonderful trips that I’ve ever taken. Ultimately, diabetes played only the smallest role; my blood sugar was a little high the second time I got out of the water, but I didn’t really feel like it slowed me down at all. And that’s the way it should be.

Here are a whole bunch of photos from our time on the Reef. Enjoy!

What’s that? You want something more nuanced? You want to know how it compares to fine art books and prints? You want me to critically evaluate the Blurb book itself? Okay, but just remember that it was (a) my first book from Blurb, (b) something that we did in an afternoon, and (c) something I could probably do better on my second go. Oh yeah, and I’m a fastidious perfectionist.

First off, let’s just get this one thing out of the way: The book is not equal in quality to a fine art photography book printed by Aperture, Steidl, Phaidon, etc. Those books appear to have finer resolution, better color, and higher production requirements. Then again they’re printed in much larger runs with lots of proofing all along the way. Okay, now that the obvious is out of the way, what did I really like?

• The cover looks beautiful. I think it’s slightly higher quality than the inside pages.
• The colors are quite good, even for a non-color-managed workflow. I know better than to compare the colors of the print to my monitor, but the colors match my memory and the gamut is decent. (They explicitly say they aren’t using an ICC workflow but seem to expect sRGB input.)
• The paper is nice. We used the slightly more expensive “premium lustre” paper.
• The binding is quite good.

What’s on the other side of the ledger?

• The halftone pattern is occasionally rather obvious, especially in continuous tone areas (such as the sky or clothing).
• Some of the skies look a bit splotchy. (It’s subtle, but still . . .) I can’t tell if some noise is getting sharpened or if there are compression artifacts during upload. Perhaps it’s something else.

Next time around — and there will be a next time, I’m sure — I’m going to pay more attention to my output sharpening, image dimensions, and compression settings. (It’s testament to the quality of Blurb that you can get a good quality book on the first try without using any of the information in the support forum.)

It’s definitely a good value. And I love our book.

Yesterday — both before and after we went to the opening — Lisa and I created a photo book that’s about to be printed via Blurb. If you discount the A-B-C’s book I wrote and illustrated in kindergarten, it’s the first book I’ve made. I print a fair bit, enjoy typography, and love photo books.* Despite loving photo books, this will be my first.

Lisa and I took some of our favorite photographs from our trip to Australia and built a book using Blurb’s BookSmart tool. It was pretty easy and very customizable — albeit a bit clunky if you want to make a lot of edits — and a lot less “cute” than what Snapfish offered. (You can even use Adobe InDesign or another tool, if you want.) I’m certainly hoping that the photos in the book look great . . . at least as good as mass-market photography monographs. If they do, I’ll probably make one containing some of my “arty” photographs.

* — I could easily amass tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt buying photography monographs and exhibition catalogs. So it’s best that I don’t look too much at Amazon, otherwise my photography wish list would probably include the whole art and photography section.

Short on time? View the abridged set of 130+ photographs.

As an overview, here’s a day-by-day view of our trip:

The Narrative:

• In Transit – To the Antipodes and Back
• Part One – Sydney
• Part Two – The Top End
• Part Three – The Red Centre
• Part Four – Queensland

Some other experiences:

• Birds of Australia
• Wicked Campervans
• Australia Wants to Kill You
• Eating our Way across Australia
• Indigenous Australian Art

You can also read about our trip.

I have much more to say about the first of them — “Contact” tells about the most recent (and probably last) “first encounter” between an Indigenous Australian group and white Australians in 1964 — but I need to mull it over some more. While I do, you can get the backstory from the London Sunday Times.

“Salt,” another Australian documentary from 2009, shows the creative process of photographer Murray Fredericks. Briefly: He bikes to the center of Lake Eyre, a vast, flat, (mostly) dry lake in South Australia; he sets up camp and a couple of cameras; he waits for the light to be just right; and then he makes a few 8×10″ film exposures. “Just right” depends on the weather and — it would seem — Fredericks’ mood. Sometimes the horizon is a crisp cut between sky and land, other times a mirror. Occasionally the horizon dissolves into nothing more than just another subtle tone between land and sky.

The photographs from his years of trips to the desert lake end the documentary, and they are truly spectacular landscapes. Many of them are on his website, which is definitely worth a look. For even more of his work, see the article at Mecha Fushigi. Here are a couple you can enjoy now:

Indeed, that pretty much sums up Australia . . and not only the plants.

Lisa and I are not birders. We like birds — mostly the pretty or unusual ones — and we frequently take snapshots of the birds we see while traveling. But we don’t have “life lists” of birds that we’ve seen. Nor do we make trips to places to see or photograph birds. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; it’s just not our thing.

So it was a little surprising that sometime during the first week we found ourselves keeping a list of the birds that we saw. And we photographed as many of the varieties that we could see, too. (Though that was mostly so we could identify the bird once we got back to our field guide.) We’re still not birders, but I think we both know a whole lot more about birds than we did a couple months ago.

We identified close to 60 different species of birds in the wild, and there are a few that we photographed which we still haven’t been able to identify. We also visited a few zoos where we saw many more birds, beautiful and strange with voices that didn’t seem to fit the body making them.

You can see a whole bunch of these birds on Flickr. Some of them will never make National Geographic or Audubon, but we hope you’ll take a gander anyway.

We’ve posted a small sampling to Flickr.

The first themed sets of photographs from our trip to Australia are now on Flickr:

• Indigenous Australian Art
• Eating our Way across Australia

More are on the way soon!