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My photographic specialty is underwater photography. However, I do occasionally take a picture above water. It is impossible not to notice and photograph the incredible topside beauty of the Central Coast — the gorgeous coastline, the stunning flower fields that bloom along Los Osos Valley Road in the late summer, the bird life, the otters, and the elephant seals. While not at the level of many local landscape and nature photographers, my topside photography has improved over the years, mainly because of my experiences on the Central Coast. I have gotten interested in HDR (high dynamic range) photography for land and seascapes. I know it can be overdone, but applied moderately I think it is beautiful and approaches what the human eye actually sees.
I have been taking pictures underwater for 33 years, since I became a certified diver in 1980. You have to be kind of crazy to get into underwater photography. If you aren't crazy when you start, you will be if you stick with it. First, you have to learn to survive in an alien environment. Before you even think about the highly specialized photographic equipment required, you have to learn how to safely breathe and move about underwater. The most important qualification for becoming a good underwater photographer is to be a good diver. You can't worry about things like f-stops, depth of field, shutter speeds, exposure, point of focus, and the other technical photographic stuff if you are not comfortable underwater. Things like breathing, buoyancy control, and awareness of time, depth and remaining air must become second nature. Only then can you start thinking about the pictures. Even with excellent diving skills, state-of-the-art equipment, and plentiful subjects, most underwater photographers have very low batting averages. You fail much more often than you succeed, and that means you discard a lot more images than you keep. But the occasional "keeper" can make it all worthwhile. Everything in underwater photography is stacked against success. First, unlike topside photography, you have a very limited amount of time to capture your image (before you have to surface or drown.) Whatever underwater subject you are seeking on each dive, you have to find it in less than an hour. You can't hang around all day waiting for something to show up. Second, from an equipment standpoint, you are working in a very hostile, corrosive environment. The camera must be protected from any contact with salt water. This means sealed "housings" that contain and protect the camera itself, requiring intricate sealed control linkages between the housing and the camera buttons and dials, all subject to mechanical failure or leakage. The housing I currently use has 32 holes through it for control mechanisms, latches and ports, each with an o-ring to seal out the salt water, each subject to leakage. That's a lot of potential leaks.
After 25 years with film cameras I switched to digital in 2004. Digital has revolutionized underwater photography, perhaps to a greater extent than topside photography. There are two huge advantages of digital photography underwater. The most important is the ability to make virtually unlimited numbers of high-resolution images on a single dive. With film, you are limited to 36 frames on each dive, unless you take down more than one camera, and most photographers simply don't do that. With digital cameras and high-capacity storage media you can shoot several hundred high-resolution images on every dive with a single camera. Before digital, almost every one of my dives ended when I ran out of film. That always seemed to come first, before any of the other things that limited my time underwater, like running out of air. Now my dives generally end when I am low on air or I need to perform some biological function which is ill-advised in a dry suit. The other big advantage is the ability, also available to topside photographers of course, to briefly review the image immediately after you record it. Admittedly the view you get of the image in the small monitor on the camera is not exactly like looking at it on a large flat-screen computer monitor, nonetheless it can give you a lot of instant feedback about composition and exposure that you didn't get with film, and that information is tremendously valuable in the underwater environment. I have dived and photographed in many of the world's premiere diving locations, the Caribbean, Alaska, the San Juan Islands, the Sea of Cortez and the Islas Revillagigedos in Mexico, Hawaii, Cocos Island in Costa Rica, the Galapagos Islands, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, the Red Sea, Papua New Guinea (four trips), and all up and down the California Coast. I have logged over 2,500 dives. When I started diving my favorite photographic subjects were the typical ones, beautiful reef and kelp scenes, fish, anemones and other small subjects, but my interests quickly gravitated to large animals, and I got obsessed with sharks. I have chased sharks all over the world, and many species have been checked off my photographic bucket list, including beautiful blue sharks here in California, whale sharks in the Sea of Cortez, hammerheads at Cocos, tiger and lemon sharks in the Bahamas, sand tiger sharks on the shipwrecks off the North Carolina Coast, and of course the magnificent great white at Guadalupe Island in Mexico.
But after all this, for a variety of reasons, my favorite divesite in the whole wide world is under an old wooden T-Pier in Morro Bay. My daughter Coleen, a highly experienced diver who has traveled with me on many of the trips I discussed above, introduced me to diving the North T-Pier when she was living in Morro Bay. The North T-Pier is in front of the Coast Guard and Harbor Department Offices, right below the power plant stacks. I, in turn, introduced it to my great friend and dive buddy Gary Powell, who in another life was my brother-in-law. Coleen, Gary, and I have been diving the pier together for more than 20 years now, but since 2006 it has become a ritual for Gary and me. In those six years we have made over 100 dives under this old pier. 100 dives in six years is not a lot of dives. When I was younger it was not unusual for me to do that many, or more, in one year. But the dive here is very tide-related. Because of currents and water clarity it can safely be done only straddling the daylight high tide. The window of opportunity for getting into the water is about an hour before the slack high tide. There are two high tides every day, separated by about 12 hours. The optimum time to make the dive is on a high tide at about noon – lighting is best when the sun, along with the tide, is high. Those conditions, a mid-day high tide when our two schedules cooperate, don't happen all that often. All things considered, 100 dives in six years is a lot of dives in Morro Bay. So in planning our trips to Morro Bay we would look for a peak high tide in the late morning. On the selected day Gary would drive south from his home in Modesto and I would drive north from mine in Bell Canyon, a small community in the southwest corner of the San Fernando Valley. Each of our drives was about 3-1/2 hours. We would meet at the pier in the morning, do a dive straddling the high tide, check into our home-away-from-home in Morro Bay (the Best Western San Marcos, where we are treated like family), clean up and head out in the afternoon for sightseeing and topside photography. Our range was from the butterfly grove in Pismo to the elephant seal beaches in San Simeon, with many visits to the trails in Montana de Oro. After a dip in the hot tub and cioppino at the Harbor Hut, we would spend the night at the Best Western, roll out early the next day, have coffee at The Rock, and do a second dive under the pier. After the dive we would head for home. We did this two-dive trip once or twice a month for six years. This routine became a treasured part of both our lives.
The dive under the North T-Pier is one of the best "muck dives" in the world. The water is very cold, requiring serious thermal protection (a drysuit for me, a heavy hooded wetsuit for Gary.) But that's a small price to pay for what we see. Under its creaky old wood deck, on a silty sand bottom, an amazing number of animals, vertebrates and invertebrates, live out their lives in and on an eclectic collection of man-made junk, on the piles, dug into the silty bottom, stalking their prey from beer bottles, PVC pipes, toilets, tires, old engine blocks, boomboxes, and all the other accumulated junk people have discarded over the decades. These animals are some of the most beautiful and unusual creatures in the world. Nudibranchs are the main photographic attraction here. They are that bizarre family of marine snails without shells that may be, as a group, the most beautiful animals in the world. Morro Bay is the nudibranch capital of California, maybe the entire west coast of North America. The number and diversity of these beautiful animals under the pier is astounding. In an area of 2,500 square feet, about the size of one typical California single-family residence, over the years we have photographed and identified 28 different nudibranch species, about 15% of all the cold-water species found in 4,000 miles of coastline from Mexico to Alaska. The whole bay, and the pier in particular, is a "goldilocks zone" for nudibranchs, currents, food, and substrate surfaces are all just right for nudibranch survival. Of course there are many other fascinating animals living in the amazing ecosystem under the pier. Small bottom-dwelling fish seem to be peeking out at you from every opening, and crabs, octopus, shrimp, and many beautiful varieties of anemones and tubeworms are everywhere.
Diving in Morro Bay has brought me in contact with some wonderful Central Coast friends, too many to mention. The photographic talent in this area is incredible and I have learned much from viewing their images and listening to them talk about how they made them. I would particularly like to acknowledge Rouvaishyana, Jerry Kirkhart, and all the docents at the Museum of Natural History for their friendship and support. Gary and I have been privileged on numerous occasions to display our photographs at the Museum and be part of many wonderful Mind Walk shows hosted there, and that has been important to us beyond words.
Please visit our Morro Bay website. More of my photos can be seen at Kenbondy.com and at Flickr.
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