Have you ever noticed that we become accustomed to the sounds around us?  Many times we get to the point that we stop hearing those sounds.  I was thinking about how I had almost completely blocked out the sounds of the birds on my way to work the other day.   Now that might not have been a bad thing particularly since they were a bunch of grackles who don’t have a song, and sound more obnoxious than a gaggle of crows.    Nevertheless, it occurred to me that in addition to grackles that there are a lot of other sounds that I have either learned to tune out, or just do so out of self preservation.  I take the 5th as to whether I tune out family members.  

But I digress.  Now when all I took were still images underwater it did not occur to me that noise might make a difference in the quality of the images that I was able to capture.  In retrospect, there are probably quite a few images I missed being able to capture because either I or those who were diving with me were too noisy.   Yes, I have shot more than my share of fish butts, and I suspect that many fish butt images were a direct result of the enormous amount of noise that open circuit scuba diving makes.  

Nevertheless, when I started shooting video it became painfully obvious just how noisy open circuit scuba diving is.  I am reminded of that line from Star Wars where Darth Vader says to Skywalker: “Luke I’m your father”…. To me that’s kind of like the sound that scuba divers make breathing on open circuit.  In the track below I did not strip off the audio track so in case you have not noticed how loud scuba is, you can hear for yourself. 

Now even breathing as slowly and quietly as I could, the grunts and school masters were plenty happy to swim away from me.  I’m going to chalk it up to noise, because that beats the alternatives.  So historically my process with video is to strip off the audio sound from the video clips and either submit it without sound to my stock agency or if I am going to use the clip for personal use, add a soundtrack.  Sometimes my choice of music is a bit questionable, but sometimes it captures the mood I feel when I look at the clip.   

So next time you are diving, there probably is a reason the fish seem to be swimming away from you… you are just too noisy.