.nudibranchs (pt. ii)
Two things I fell in love with from the moment I did my first Discover Scuba Diving were the colours and the weirdness of all the stuff we ran into underwater.
I’m a graphic specialist. I *thought* I knew about colour. Very bluntly put, I’d been saturating my way through life in Photoshop to accentuate the colours. To bring out the vibrance in the colour in images.
Those colours!
When I put my head underwater, and we went for that short guided tour after those first few underwater skills, I had to force myself to keep my mouth closed around the regulator. I had an almost literal jaw-dropping moment.
After that I laughed in my head, telling myself if I was ever going to shoot pictures underwater I would have to DEsaturate the colours.
In the near-crystal clear waters of Camiguin, where I came to live for a couple of years not much later, I saw colours I had never seen before.
I saw weird creatures I had no clue existed.
Blessed
After that Discover Scuba experience I decided that this is what I wanted to do.
I invested small fortune in underwater photography equipment, and an additional small fortune to become a scuba and freediver instructor, and was blessed with the opportunity to live on an island where beautiful corals were my backyard and I could grab a tank whenever I wanted.
And while I have thousands of images of beautiful, weird, tiny, big, and colourful creatures, it is only a fraction of what *we* have actually discovered about the oceans.
Did you know *we* have documented only 9% of all the species of creatures living in the oceans? So we don’t know of an estimated 91%. Crazy!
And it’s not self-evident. With global warming (yeah, that’s really a thing!), the oceans get warmer. Corals start dying and bleaching when the ocean gets warmer than 1 degree above its own historical average in that area for too long. For the Indo-Pacific that’s around 31-32 degrees. I’ve seen the bleaching happening and it pained my heart to see it.
I don’t want to even think about losing all that beauty.
Do you?
This may not be for everyone, but imagine this on large format as a canvas on your wall… How awesome would that be?
Contact me if you’re interested. From prints on canvas to kappa board to giclée or archival art paper. Nearly everything is possible. Check a selection of my underwater images here.