Exposing the Beauty of the Ocean’s Depths : Underwater Artists Shoot for Perfection

No doubt, there are magic moments.

Dick Madsen has been taking underwater photos for 12 years now, but he will never forget the time he and a friend were diving off the back side of Anacapa Island. Several harbor seals began to play around them. One seal was particularly curious. It first approached Madsen, darting in close, then pausing to delicately scratch its flipper across Madsen’s chest. Perhaps judging him an inappropriate suitor, the seal turned to Madsen’s partner, swimming in close and wrapping both flippers around her shoulders.

Retaining her composure, Madsen’s friend placed her hands on the harbor seal’s sides. Suspended in the water column, the two spun slowly in a blue cathedral ballroom, one marionette from the animal kingdom, one from the human kingdom.

“It was if they were dancing,” says Madsen. “It almost made me want to cry.”

Indeed, underwater photographers often feel the need to bawl like babies, though their reasons for doing so usually have little to do with ethereal underwater visions.

“I’ve been shooting pictures underwater for 35 years, and I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” says David Doubilet, a contract photographer for National Geographic and one of the best underwater photographers in the world. “It can be terribly frustrating.”

In the case of the dancing harbor seal, Madsen had even more cause for anguish. “I had just put my camera on the boat,” he says.

A big man with a ready laugh, Madsen, 57, is a retired sheet-metal worker who now runs a charter boat business from his back-yard dock at Oxnard’s Mandalay Bay. He charters the 25-foot Double Jump mostly to divers, handily allowing him to plop overboard with a camera.

Like most underwater photographers, Madsen is passionate about his hobby. His home is strewn with books filled with surreal photos of a world like no other, the bug-eyed and the behemoth, the spindly legged and the smooth-finned, critters waving carrot-like antennae, thick purple tubes with velvet smooth finishes, fish brush-stroked with color so violent it bleeds from the page, an assembled collective that mutes the wildest imaginings.

It’s jaw-dropping stuff, taken in exotic locales like Hawaii and the Red Sea, French Polynesia and Palau. But if you think underwater photographers must experience jet lag and rude customs clerks to attain such pictures, you’re wrong.

“Southern California’s kelp forests are some of the most beautiful places in the world,” says the Geographic’s Doubilet, who has been to each of the above destinations and just about everywhere else, too. “For the underwater photographer, the Channel Islands are an extraordinary place.”

Ernie Brooks II, an avid underwater photographer and president of the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, goes a step further. “Our own back yard is the best in the world . . . and the most spectacular,” Brooks says.

This doesn’t guarantee recognizable pictures, however. Underwater photographers are a keenly enthusiastic lot, partly because the beauty of the undersea world elicits nothing less but also because if they weren’t enthralled with their hobby, they would promptly hurl their camera gear into the nearest abyss.

A few things to consider about taking pictures underwater: One, it’s wet. Modern technology has produced remarkable underwater cameras and protective housings, but this doesn’t mean they won’t leak--a dribble of salt water can inflict, at minimum, several hundred dollars worth of damage.

It’s dark down there, too. Reds, oranges and yellows are absorbed in the first few feet, and everything else disappears shortly thereafter. While the water off the Channel Islands can exhibit startling clarity--visibility of 80 feet or more--more often than not, the same microscopic sea creatures that cause local waters to brim with life also often turn the water to green fog. Unless you carry your own light in the form of powerful flashes, you won’t get pictures of anything at all.

Though the buoyancy of water takes most of the sting out of 25 pounds of lighting equipment, hanging on to all this gear in, say, a two-knot current is still a bit like trying to open an umbrella while standing on the wing of an airplane at 30,000 feet. There are plenty of other annoyances too, but it would be sadistic to go on about them.

“Let’s just say that if you’re easily frustrated you won’t like underwater photography and you won’t last,” says 30-year-old Venturan Cindy Oakes, who first discovered the joys of shooting underwater when she went to Australia with 16 rolls of film and came back with one decent picture. “You have to be someone who is willing to persevere.”

Apparently, there are plenty of folks possessed of the requisite pig-headedness. According to scuba industry professionals, underwater photography’s popularity is burgeoning, a trend mirrored here in the county.

“There are more people picking up cameras and learning to take pictures underwater than ever before,” says Ventura’s Dave Satterberg, president of the Channel Islands Underwater Photographic Society, the largest club of its type in the county, with more than 100 active members.

Satterberg, 29, reckons many underwater photographers are coming over from hunting. Satterberg himself was a spear fisherman before he picked up a camera several years ago. In fact, some underwater photographers believe the skills required to capture a good picture aren’t much different from those needed to bag game.

“Underwater photography, like hunting, requires a sense of trail craft,” says Doubilet. “You learn how to watch and look, you learn how to stalk a fish. The only difference is it’s a million times harder to shoot a fish with camera than it is with a spear.”

Granted, there is plenty of undersea life that can’t bolt off, explaining why underwater photographers’ portfolios brim with photos of tube worms, kelp and abalone. Yet even capturing rooted subjects requires a practiced savvy.

“You’re often hunting around for things the size of a dime,” says Venturan Hal Mitzenmacher, who, despite nearly 20 years of diving experience, was startled by the world he saw when he finally took a camera along. “You see things you never noticed when you didn’t have a camera in your hand. You start becoming very aware of how beautiful and intricate all the little creatures are.”

But an equal amount of undersea life is not fixed in one place, creating underwater photography’s most frustrating and arduous task--getting the subject in the frame. Free-swimming critters are skittish and uncooperative, explaining why underwater snapshots contain more fish bits than the dumpster behind a seafood restaurant.

Imagine assembling your loved ones for a family portrait, only to shoot their backsides bolting out the door. More disconcerting still, imagine them charging you. Brooks, shooting pictures off San Miguel Island, narrowly dodged grievous harm when several aggravated elephant seals, each roughly 1,500 pounds of collective blubber and muscle, charged past him in one hell of a hurry.

Brooks wasn’t so lucky in his encounter with a porpoise named Tuffy. “I moved the wrong way and we hit head on,” says Brooks, who came away from the collision with three cracked ribs. “You learn not to approach animals as you approach humans. You’re on their terms. If they want to come up to you they will. If they don’t, they won’t.”

Pressing the issue is a mistake. Escorting a group of underwater photography students on a night dive off Santa Barbara Island, Brooks came across a four-foot angel shark resting on the sandy bottom. Brooks removed his wet-suit glove and reached down to stroke the shark’s back. The shark came off the bottom in a blur. Before the sand had even begun to settle, Brooks was shoving his glove back on his hand to keep his students from panicking at the sight of blood.

“I have never seen anything react that fast,” says Brooks, who lost part of his index finger. “I guess that’s how they grow to be old angel sharks.”

Underwater photographers will talk at length about the skill involved in catching a subject at just the right moment to produce a breathtaking shot, but they are also honest enough to admit that some of their finest work is the result of fortuitous timing, if not blind luck.

Satterberg captured one of his best images by holding his camera overhead and shooting down at the harbor seal crawling right up his body. One of Brooks’ most riveting images is a black-and-white photo of a blue shark shot between Santa Cruz and Anacapa islands. Sharks as a rule are skittish and hard to photograph. But with Brooks hanging 50 feet below the surface, this one swam out of a porcelain-blue backdrop and moved languidly in, veering off only three feet from Brooks’ lens.

“She turned and looked right into my eye with her eye,” Brooks says. “The focus was right, the light angle was perfect. I knew right then that I’d captured the best image of my life.”

In that particular instance, Brooks had time for only three shots. Given more time, and faced with a wealth of factors that can muck up a picture, underwater photographers typically adopt a different tack.

“He who shoots the most images wins,” says Satterberg.

Madsen, who will plop overboard in almost any sea condition, equates underwater photography with fishing. “Can’t catch much if you don’t drop a lot of lines in the water,” he says.

Indeed, this proclivity to shoot willy-nilly can produce impressive results. Oxnard resident Dave Reid has been shooting underwater for 10 years. In that time, by his standards, he has produced 12 pictures that give him real satisfaction. How many pictures has he shot in those 10 years?

“Probably 25,000,” Reid says, “and a whole lot of them went right in the waste basket.”

Experienced underwater photographers stress the importance of not being overly critical. Get down there, shoot, just have fun, they say--good advice they have trouble applying to themselves.

“It’s true,” says Mitzenmacher. “Underwater photographers are their own harshest critics. They’re impossible to please.”

Unable to provide objective input, they rely on each other. The Channel Islands Underwater Photographic Society--of which Madsen, Satterberg, Oakes, Mitzenmacher and Reid are all members--holds contests once a month. Some local photographers have also shown their works elsewhere, with impressive results. Brooks currently has an exhibit of his photos at the Smithsonian in Washington.

Oxnard resident Terry Schuller, who is married to Reid, recently captured the top award at an international gathering in New York, presenting her with a bit of a dilemma. “First prize was a trip for one for a week of diving in the Caribbean,” says Schuller, who knows it will be hard to leave her husband behind.

Award-winning shots are one thing, but underwater photographers are happy just to get a good shot. Camera and strobes in hand, Madsen dived off the back side of Anacapa Island on a recent morning. The water was murky, the wind coming up hard to stir things up even more. Still, Madsen popped off a dozen shots, hopeful that one or two would turn out to his liking.

“I can surprise myself,” he said, shouting into the wind. “I have in the past.” Madsen considers this. He shouted into the wind again. “Any time I get a good shot, I surprise myself.”