Throwback Thursday – Underwater in ’95

In 1991, Helmut Horn, an incredibly talented artist and Hasselblad shooter, talked me into getting my scuba certification. At the time he was president of a hotel group that managed Cheeca Lodge in the Florida Keys. He generously hosted my introduction into scuba, and opened a door to a world I never anticipated would become such an incredible part of my life.

The backstory on the two images above is perfect, because most of my underwater images over the years were throwbacks – no, I mean they were terrible and needed to literally be thrown back. I have hundreds of “artistically underexposed” images, rarely capturing anything I wanted to keep. However, hanging out with some great friends over the years who captured some amazing images, I grew to have an appreciation for the skill set it took to capture the true beauty of the undersea world. Remember, this is all before digital and with Hasselblad, everything was manual. 

Cleaning out a box in the garage, I recently came across a sheet of eight chromes from a dive trip in Grand Cayman. They were captured with a Hasselblad H38 housing loaded with Kodak Ektachrome in a 903SWC. I had two big Ikelite strobes on arms coming off the housing.

While I love both images above, I can promise you, based on my track record, they were probably both accidents. While being in the ocean became an obsessive passion, I just wasn’t in the water enough to truly practice and master the craft of underwater photography.

However, as I’ve said in the past, the best part of our industry has nothing to do with photography, but the friendships that come out of everyone’s love for the craft. Scuba introduced me to Helmut, then Tom and Linda Danielson and later Bob Rose, together with a long list of incredible friends. We all shared a wonderful common denominator – a love for the ocean.

Happy Throwback Thursday! Take a few minutes and wander through that box of old images stashed away, and then have some fun and share it on your blog. And, even if you don’t want to post the images, just the trip down Memory Lane makes it all worth it!