I had been diving for nearly 20 years before I ever came across black water diving. When I first heard that to do the dive we would be out in very deep water at night (perhaps over 1000 feet deep) with video lights on a string providing light to the creatures that might swim up for the depths, I had a few concerns. Sure I had done quite a few “shark” dives over the years, but I had always done those dives in the daylight so I could at least see them coming. I talked to the dive leader and heard that in all the black water dives they had done to that point they had not been visited by any sharks. Then I asked about what I might see in the night. I then heard about the great vertical migration. The short version is that billions of larval size creatures swim up from the depths each night to feed at the surface, only to return to the depths before daytime so they do not become some predator’s breakfast.

Like much in diving good buoyancy control was essential because unlike some places that do tethered black water dives we would be swimming fee without being tethered to the boat. Now controlling buoyancy plus controlling light for taking pictures sounded like quite a challenge. One of the tips I did hear and pay attention to was to listen to my ears. If I was having to clear that meant i was going deeper. So I thought that what I would do is have one eye on the string of lights and the pumpkin at the top, and have one eye focused on what was available to see.

My first black water dive, I swam around a ton and my focus light had a very wide beam. I thought I was swimming in a snow storm. The closest I got to getting a usable image was a picture of the ink from a squid that had jetted away from me.

Three years went by and I returned with the same camera rig except this time instead of a wide angle focus light I used one with a very narrow beam. Was it hard taking picture of the creatures I found on my second black water dive? In a word: yes. But I was more confident of what I would do and had a good bit more success in capturing some of the critters that had come up from the depths. Now buoyancy was still a big concern because even with having the string of lights as a reference point it would have been very easy to drop below the last light. What I can say is that black water diving is an advanced skill and if not tethered it is really a dive that should be saved until the diver has excellent buoyancy control skills.

I started doing blue water dives in the Caribbean almost 20 years ago. Clear water, a pretty good abundance of fish life and a number of species of shrimp, crabs and mollusks. Of the mollusks, sea slugs and other critters that had caught my eye, mostly did so because of their brilliant colors. Early on I did not spend much time searching for colorful critters. At least according to the critter books I have, it looked to me like there might be slightly more than a dozen nudibranch species in the Caribbean.

Overtime, it appeared to me that I needed to expand my horizons and see some of the sea life in the Pacific. After several trips to various parts of the Pacific, I stumbled on to muck diving in the Philippines.

Now mind you historically, my underwater shooting has been probably 90%/10% wide angle to macro images. So on my first trip to do muck diving, I was trying to get my mind around a very different kind of shooting plus get a sense of what the creatures might look like and how to capture them. When I got to the Philippines one of the comparasions that struck me was that unlike the Caribbean that has slightly more than a dozen different types of nudibranch for example, there were over a thousand different varieties of nudibranch.

I learned a lot on the first trip, not the least of which was to see the benefit of controlling the light through the use of a snoot. The snoot I took on the first trip to the Philippines I had picked up a few weeks before I left. Yes, it constricted the light from the strobe that I attached it to. But, aiming the snooted light was a real problem. The set up lacked an aiming light. Frankly, the snoot looked more like a funnel that you might find in your kitchen than a light shaping device. So it was largely hit or miss unless the guide I was with helped me aim the snoot. When shooting the light worked, it was really helpful at lighting the subject and not lighting a lot of the background.

Then I tried a snoot that had a focus light in it. For someone like me with relatively short arms, its still a challenge to get the snoot aimed well and then take pictures. Nevertheless having an aiming light did make it much easier to focus on everything else about capturing the image and worry less about getting the snoot aimed right.

So I guess you could say I’m hooked on controlling the light with a snoot.