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A quick encounter with a dolphin. (John Christopher Fine)
I was filming underwater. I heard clicks. They came in rapid succession. When I turned, a dolphin was poised about 10 feet away. Sunlight filtered down to make it an exceptional encounter. I took the picture, and the dolphin was gone.
There are those moments in nature, whether on horseback in the mountains, hiking wilderness trails, waiting patiently in a blind on the African veld, or crossing Fifth Avenue in busy Manhattan, when photo ops present themselves.
Red-tailed hawks that nested atop a stone lentil of a luxury apartment building facing Central Park caused quite a stir. Photographers and interested bird watchers set up their cameras with powerful telephoto lenses to get a glimpse of parents feeding their young. Some staked out the park to document the hawks swooping down on pigeons to provide a meal for their nestlings.
While I’ve tromped the jungles of the world, climbed high mountains, and discovered the folly of human endeavor at war, I am an underwater man. For those who never venture beneath the sea, nor look beneath the waves, I bring back images of life that amaze with form and color.
“I didn’t see anything” was the typical divers’ lament when the late Norine Rouse, Florida’s best-known dive instructor, guided them over her favorite reefs. “They didn’t see because they didn’t look,” Norine would tell me, utterly frustrated by the failure of some people to be observant.
Of course many expect the dolphin encounter I had to be routine. Most ask me if we will see sharks underwater. Some expect whales to loom out of the blue. Large and venerable creatures of the sea are there, but we don’t always see them. What we see, if we are willing to be patient and observe life underwater with a photographer’s eye, is a panoply of form and color, grace and wonder of things little and big.
Color disappears to human perception in the absence of light. Turn the lights off in a room filled with bright reds and greens. What you will see is black and white or gray. Lights on and the colors return. The colors never went away—without light, they are not seen.
Christmas tree worms poke out of brain coral with elk horn coral in the distance. (John Christopher Fine)
The ocean acts like a giant cyan filter. Its blue tint filters light. As we descend underwater, colors disappear to the human eye. Within a few feet, the warmer colors are not perceived, and, at depths of about 100 feet, all that appears is blue. Turn on a waterproof flashlight and the colors appear in all their glory.
Strobe photography is a necessity underwater. While digital imagery has improved the light-gathering properties of cameras, light is still required to bring out colors. Never mind the various photo enhancement and coloring techniques available on computers. The original image—that chance encounter with a marine animal, the unique behavior of a sea creature—captured on film becomes an extraordinary document of life little understood even by science.
When space exploration claimed the largest share of U.S. budgets in a race against the former Soviet Union, one wag commented: “We know more about the moon’s behind than we do about the ocean’s bottom.”
Crinoid on soft coral. (John Christopher Fine)
How do marine turtles return at the same time every year to the exact beaches where they hatched out? Turtles lay eggs on the beach. The eggs hatch, and a very few babies survive to make it down to the ocean and out into the currents where they float for upward of five years. When they return to mate and for females to lay eggs, they swim over hundreds, even thousands of miles of ocean.
No GPS, rather, as far as we can determine, magnetic crystals in the brain enable turtles to navigate. I have photographed the same male loggerhead turtle in the waters off Boynton Beach, Florida, over the last 19 years. He is gone most of the year but comes back to the same reef every year to mate.
