Seascapes
In summer, especially, our thoughts turn to the sea. These books -- some new, some classic -- celebrate this glorious underwater world with magnificent and timeless photographs. BY KEN MCALPINE
Clockwise from top left: imperial shrimp at Cannibal Rock, Komodo Island, Indonesia; feather star on coral, Republic of Seychelles; black-spotted puffer being cleaned by a Pacific cleaner shrimp at Milne Bay, Papua, New Guinea
FIFTY PLACES TO DIVE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Diving Experts Share the World’s Greatest Destinations
by Chris Santella
Reprinted with permission from Fifty Places To Dive Before You Die by Chris Santella, published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang.
If oceans were your oyster -- and why shouldn’t they be? -- here is your wish list: Fiji, Belize, Australia, California’s serene kelp forests, the azure waters of the Florida Keys. Santella’s experts, a collection of many of the undersea world’s most respected names, give you the inside skinny on their favorite dive destinations.
Frankly, a visit to any of these magical places will make you wonder if you’ve already gone to this world’s version of heaven.
Left to right, top to bottom: a fingernail-size pygmy sea horse using coral camouflage in Kapalai, Sabah, Malaysia; a juvenile Banggai cardinalfish swims among a sea urchin’s spines in LembehStraits, Sulawesi, Indonesia; a mandarinfish couple in Maratua, Kalimantan, Indonesia; Michel’s ghost goby backdropped by hard coral in Sabah, Malaysia; nudibranchs, a member of the snail family, in Sabah, Malaysia
REEF by Scubazoo
Photographs reproduced by permission of DK, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. from Reef by Scubazoo. © 2007 by DK Publishing. All rights reserved.
Sounds like Seuss, but Scubazoo is a team of underwater photographers and filmmakers, and their book, as you can see from the sampling above, is a collection of the surreal, the sublime, and the outright strange. Happily for this book, and your eyes, Scubazoo is based in the Malaysian state of Sabah in Borneo, an area dubbed the “coral triangle” for its biological richness. Bumped by 13-foot tiger sharks, raked by strong currents, snubbed by oceanic residents who seem to have a near-comic sense for when a photographer is running low on air, the Scubazoo team snapped this remarkable collection with simple aims: to bring you close to an astonishing world -- and leave the scent of mystery too.
“When I look through images taken by other people, the thing I enjoy most is coming across an image that I have no idea how they managed to capture it,” says Scubazoo cofounder Jason Isley. “Hopefully, some of the images in Reef have that effect. We spend hours underwater trying to capture unique images. I think it’s important the reader enjoys the beauty of the image but is also left to wonder how it was taken.” scubazoo.com
FishFace: Portraits by David Doubilet
FishFace by David Doubilet, published by Phaidon, 2007, www.phaidon.com Photographs: © David Doubilet, courtesy Phaidon Press
Top to bottom, left to right: cow fish in Tasmania, Australia; yellow pufferfish at Aldabra Reef, Seychelles; saw shark in Tasmania, Australia; diagonal-banded sweetlips and cleaner wrasse at Great Barrier Reef, Australia
“Fish are like living cartoons, they always look like somebody else’s uncle,” says David Doubilet. “They are extraordinary creatures.” Contributor-in-residence for National Geographic, Doubilet’s honors run long, but the accolades haven’t stripped him of his sense of humor. “We fly across oceans with a thousand pounds of diving gear, camera gear, and computers to make a picture of a tiny creature the size of your thumb. It’s a bizarre existence.”
Doubilet has been spellbound since he took his first underwater shot at age 12 -- using a Brownie Hawkeye camera housed inside a rubber anesthesiologist’s bag -- and his aim is to cast the same spell on you.
“The desire for a photographer is not just to reveal, but to amaze and astound.”
Sometimes all that’s required is a slight twist on an already surreal subject; witness the Tasmanian saw shark’s underside.
“We were shooting saw sharks in Hobart Sound. We already had photos of them hunting in the green seaweed and swimming free, and I thought ‘I wonder what the ventral side looks like?’ A few of them were swimming overhead. I managed to get underneath one and we lit it from the top and we got this insanely strange picture.” daviddoubilet.com
PHILIPPINES: HEART OF THE OCEAN by Michael AW
Philippines: Heart of the Ocean, printing technology by ColourScan Singapore. Author-autographed limited-edition copies can be ordered from one@oneocean.com.
Clockwise from left: ghost goby on soft coral; hippocampus sea horse; puppyface nudibranch; sea squirts colony; atolla specie -- deep sea jellyfish
The best underwater photographers are part artist, part technician, part conservationist, part poet, and (large part) patient saint. Michael AW possesses this résumé in spades, and his new book turns a keen lens on the Southeast Asia seas, teeming with life and home to some of the world’s deepest waters and strangest creatures. AW captures exotic animals rarely, if ever, seen before. Unlike many underwater photography books, these photos were shot largely in the present -- seven trips over two years -- AW’s aim to show this world honestly as it exists now, in all its beauty and decline. Like Doubilet and Isley, AW is a passionate conservationist, his camera and his own pockets (part of the proceeds from Heart will go to support conservation projects in the Asian Pacific) fighting to preserve a world sorely threatened by everything from pollution to overfishing.
Though the oceans may seem a foreign place, we are far closer to them than we think.
“The ocean is the cradle of life on earth,” says AW. “It provides more than half the oxygen we use, 90 percent of the space for our world’s life, and it controls the climate of our planet.” michaelaw.com
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