Every year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) puts out an issue about some of the best engineering jobs around. There are several people featured, but this year has an article of interest:

Dream Jobs 2010: Ernst Völlm, Rapture of the Deep

Although this should not be construed as an endorsement, he works for Uemis.

Schott Beckham from Sea Level Scuba

Reef Fish Identification

If you’ve ever wondered what that silver fish was you saw on the reef,now is your chance to find out...or rather learn how to find out!! Yes, Schott Beckham, a real native of Melbourne and an owner of Sea LevelScuba, will present a shortened version of the Reef Fish Identification ourse. You will learn how to tell the difference between a Grunt and aSnapper, a French Angelfish and Gray Angelfish…. You will look at the eef in a whole new way because knowledge will give you the keys to the city!! So don’t miss this incredible opportunity.

It's a scene of startling beauty: Countless garden eels, some more than 6 feet long, rise out of their ocean-floor burrows and, as they waver in the ocean current, they resemble a field of tall grasses in a gentle breeze.

This shot, from the new IMAX documentary "Under the Sea 3D," now showing at Celebration North, was costly, time-consuming and required mountains of patience.

"Every time we'd turn the camera on, they'd go down into their holes," said director Howard Hall, calling from Detroit, where he was promoting the film. "We had to turn it off and on to acclimate them to the noise. At $60 a second, which is what it costs to run the IMAX 3D camera, it's an expensive proposition. In the film, you can see the eels slowly going down, and they're reacting to the camera running."

The success of Hall's 2006 "Deep Sea 3D" film, which grossed $37 million on domestic IMAX screens, opened the door for a follow-up project, which he undertook with his wife, producer Michele Hall. They hauled the ridiculously impractical, 1,300-pound IMAX 3D camera -- which only shoots three minutes at a time before needing a reload -- to remote locations near Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, shooting 10 hours of film for the 40-minute final product.

He waited six hours to film a stonefish, camouflaged in the sand, lunging at its prey.

"Having that kind of patience is probably a genetic defect that I've got," he said. "I can understand why other people wouldn't bother. I spent 350 hours underwater making the film, and a lot of that is just waiting for things to happen.

Howard, who has had a 30-year career filming numerous underwater documentaries for TV and the big screen, considers himself, first and foremost, an oceanographer. He said anticipating the animals' behavior and understanding the ecosystems is the expertise he relies upon most while shooting.

There's also an exploratory element to his work; documenting wildlife in obscure places means capturing on film creatures nobody has ever seen before.

"Some species in the film haven't even been identified yet," he said. "The little shark that crawls along the bottom is an undescribed species."

by John Serba | The Grand Rapids Press