The Other Side of the Globe
An underwater photograph, David Doubilet says, should be about how light and water work together. Sounds relatively simple until you realize that you're dealing with an environment in which natural light is lost very quickly. And with the light, color—red is gone in less than three feet of water; all else but blue soon after. "The eye is a much better receptor and translator of color in the sea than any film or digital sensor can be," David says, "so I have to light up the foregrounds with strobes." The payoff for his effort is the depiction of "colors that don't exist anywhere else in the world, and colors that are more vibrant than the most vibrant colors on the terrestrial side of the globe."
He says that after light, underwater images are about size relationships. A shipwreck image, for example, or a photograph of a reef system, won't work at all if a diver isn't there to indicate to the viewer the size of the wreck or the scope of the reef. "So much of the underwater seascape is beautiful," David says, "but how far away is it? Where does it drop down? It's not like you're walking to the edge of the Grand Canyon and looking down and seeing an incredible vista spread out before you. The undersea world doesn't work that way."
Still, for more than 45 years, David has been making the undersea world work and bringing it to life in unique images. He's photographed over 60 stories for National Geographic magazine, where he is a contributing photographer-in-residence. His photographs have also appeared in numerous diving magazines, and he is a contributing editor and feature columnist for Sport Diver and Seascapes and Dive. David has published seven books, most recently Fish Face, from Phaidon Publishers; The Kingdom of Coral: Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, from National Geographic Books; and Water Light and Time, also from Phaidon.
Depicting the underwater realm in photographs presents an interesting problem. Here is a strange, new world that very quickly becomes so familiar that its images become clichés. The best underwater photographers are constantly looking for at least fresh and at best fascinating ways of portraying it. "The underwater world is both mysterious and unknown," David says, "yet it is in some ways very homogenized. You can dive on a reef in St. Lucia and you can dive on a reef a thousand miles across the Caribbean basin in Honduras, and they're virtually the same looking. So how do I show you the high point of either place?" And it's not only places that present a challenge. "There are only x-amount of fish, and unlike humans they don't change their clothes very often. Now, the clothes are vibrant and beautiful, but I've got to figure out a way of making that fish distinctive and different by using its environment or a bit of its behavior, which is the absolute hardest thing to do."
Somehow, though, for over four decades, David has managed to portray this exotic world in photographs of startling originality and beauty. One of the ways he does it is to keep in mind the need to bring order to the undersea world. "The thing you tend to search for underwater is a geometric pattern in a world without geometry, a world without corners," he has said. "When you find the patterns it gives a sense of order, of place and makes the picture attractive as a composition. That's what makes people take notice—the geometry of a school of fish or a reef."
"Water is chaos. Not for the creatures that live there, but visual chaos for the diver and photographer who visit. And people like to see compositional order in photographs. It gives us some sense of reference."
Experience and first-hand knowledge is vital, as is safety, but, David has said, "the first thing you depend on in this work is the knowledge of others. The naturalists, guides, other divers—you've got to respect whatever they have to say. These are the people the photographer depends on to get him there and help keep him safe. It's like war photographers need people to take them to the front so they can get the pictures. And while I'm not suggesting that what I do is as dangerous as battlefield photography, the importance of others and of logistics is the same."
He's aware also that he's photographing a world that's rapidly changing. "The late Peter Benchley and I did a story in Cuba," he says. "This is the Caribbean, our backyard, and when we started diving in the late 50s and early 60s, you jumped in the water and there would be rivers of fish—yellow grunts and snappers, French grunts and waving sea fans and elkhorn coral and staghorn coral. Now there are very few places in the Caribbean where you find that variety, except Cuba. Cuba was preserved because Castro didn't let anyone dive or fish or go out on the outer reefs because a lot of times going out there was a one-way ticket out of the country. It turned out those policies were a benefit that a lot of divers and environmentalists now say was a marvelous thing for the environment."
David says he's been fortunate to have had the time on his assignments, particularly for National Geographic, to do the job well. But he's not, he says, one of the most patient of National Geographic photographers. There's just too much to see, too much to photograph. "Unlike some photographers, I couldn't wait for weeks to get one shot of one subject. I'd feel I was gypping myself out of the chance to get other shots."
He's always thinking about the other shots, the photographs not yet made. "Papua New Guinea has the richest coral," he says, "and the coral reefs of Irian Jaya in Indonesia are stupendous, incredible, complex and difficult, and they have the most number of species of coral and species of fish. And other places in Indonesia and Palau and Micronesia. And the Red Sea, where I did a lot of assignments over the years. And one of my favorite places is Tasmania. And South Africa, where there are white sharks, millions of sardines and whales…."
Passion trumps patience every time.
Diving Companions
"I'm a walking history of Nikon digital," David says. Make that a diving history, as he's used a D1X in a Seacam housing, D100 and D70 in Nexus housings and, currently, a D2x in a Seacam. A D200 and another D2X body are in the future.
When it comes to lenses, wide-angle is the key to underwater photography—extreme wide-angle. With the D2X David uses a 10.5mm f/2.8G ED AF DX Fisheye-Nikkor and a 12-24mm f/4G ED-IF AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor. For close-ups he likes two Micro-Nikkors, the 60mm f/2.8D AF Micro-Nikkor and the 105mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor. For his "half-and-half" pictures—in which the surface of the water is the horizon line (the photograph of the turtle is an example)—he chooses from among three fixed focal length wide-angles: the 18mm f/2.8D, 20mm f/2.8D and 24mm f/2.8D Nikkors.
David's strobes are most often Sea & Sea units positioned on arms attached to the camera housings—short arms for close-up work, longer for wide-angle shots. He'll occasionally use an off-camera light set on the sea floor, either wedged into a rock formation or held down with weights.
Underwater Photography, A.D.
Diving photography B.D. (Before Digital) meant 36 images per camera carried below. "The best I've ever done," David said back in the day, "is about 17 rolls of film. Sports and fashion photographers will do that in an hour."
Underwater photography A.D. means housings with picture windows and all camera controls accessible. "Not only can I see the pictures, I can appreciate them—or I can delete them," David says. The advantages are obvious: more keepers on the memory card and fewer trips to the surface to replace cards. The disadvantages? Only one, and it has to do with the nature of photographers. "Every second underwater counts," David says, "and as you're looking at the photo you've just taken, you're using up your air. Besides, the moment you start looking at what you've done, something fabulous is going to be happening in front of your lens. But it's an unstoppable habit, looking at the pictures. It's an addiction: photographers have to look at their own pictures. I try to keep it to a minimum—just a quick check to see if I've got the exposure."
And while he may look, he doesn't touch. There's no image manipulation in David's photographs, no matter if they're digital or film. He has said that it's part of his job to bring back the truth of "a completely new, unknown world. Anything more that you do is just going to confuse the matter. People won't know what they're looking at when they see the photograph."
He tells about one of his most famous photographs, the image of diver Dinah Halstead circled by a school of barracuda (the second picture accompanying this story).
"I worked very hard—and I was very lucky—to get that picture, and it's one of the pictures I'm sort of known for, one of my more widely published photographs. The school began to circle her as we swam into it, and I dove to the bottom, looked up and photographed. Now, barracuda in the Pacific will do this, but usually they'll circle far away from a diver. It's very hard to get a picture with the fish that close."
Then he saw what seemed to be an even more extraordinary picture. "I opened a diving magazine one day and saw a picture of a school of circling barracuda and in the middle of the school was a shark. Incredible! I managed to reach the editor of the magazine to talk to him about this amazing picture, and he said, 'Oh, no, we had rather poor pictures, so I put the shark in the middle.'"
