Great white sharks.  Wow, where do I start?  I was born, lived, and dived for many years in South Africa–a part of the world that has become synonymous with great white sharks.   Yet in spite of 25 years of being in the water I had never seen one.  I always imagined if it ever happened, it would be a very organic event.  I had always visualized (as I do with all my images) this interaction happening out of nowhere.  I’d be shooting something completely different and suddenly I’d be approached by a great white in its own element.  There I’d be, just swimming free, taking pictures and boom!  I’d get that dream shot.   The one thing I knew for sure was that I never wanted to have to get into a protective cage to get that shot.  No way.  Well, a quarter century passed and that natural experience never happened—and the requests from clients for a great white shot was getting louder.  I was also getting very tired of answering that same question over and over again, “Have you ever seen a great white?”  No. No!  NO!

It was time to apply rule #6:  Get over yourself.  It was time to just get in a cage and get the shot.  I wanted to show something other than the great white’s kill potential or an open mouth gnashing at hanging bait.  I wasn’t exactly sure what my great white dream shot would look like but I knew I had to get in the water with one to find out.  For a hundred reasons, I picked Mexico.  Guadeloupe Island is an arid piece of rock 300 miles from Mexico’s Baja peninsula in the Pacific Ocean.  With underwater visibility around 100’ and a large group of resident great whites, it sounded interesting to say the least.

Bags packed and flights booked I flew west to San Diego and bused across the Mexican border into Tijuana, then south along the coast of Baja to the port of Ensenada.  There is no mistaking a great white live-aboard dive boat.  Walking down the dock, I could see her large rectangular surface cages hanging off the transom and a third deep circular cage attached to the davit crane on the top deck.  These aluminum “man cans” made her stick out like a sore thumb between the rag tag commercial fishing boats and dilapidated sport fleet.  After a mountain of red tape, visits from port officials and Mexican marines, we were off for the 20-hour ride to the island.

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The rest of the day and all of the night was spent pitching around the Pacific with nothing much to do but prep cameras and wait.  During all this down time I wondered about the shot I was looking for, what the light would be like, what lens I was going to use, and what shutter speeds I would need to freeze action, all the while expecting the great white to be just like the other sharks I had encountered countless times before.  How different could a great white be from a 15’ tiger shark, right?

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Not long after sunrise the island appeared on the horizon surrounded in mist that gave it a Jurassic Park feel.  An hour or two later its red, arid cliffs started to protrude from the white tablecloth.  The place looked ominous.  The vertical rock faces were pock marked and scarred by erosion leaving deep, circular caves that looked like eye sockets in towering skulls.   The bay felt eerily calm after the previous 20 plus hours of rocking and rolling.  The fur seals and sea lions’ calls from the beach echoed across the craggy slopes sounding as though they were whispering groans from the massive rock face above.  This was like no place I had ever been.

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The persistent din of the ever-present power generator, the clang of cages, and the whine of the davit crane overpowered the sounds from shore and my attention was back to our boat.  The two surface cages were being readied.  A collection of surface demand air hoses ran like florescent yellow spaghetti from storage tanks on the boat, over the transom’s dive deck and into tightly wound bunches at the entrance on the top of each cage. Already schools of baitfish were congregated in clouds at the stern of the boat, their interconnecting, writhing bodies like a living veil around the roof of both cages.  The water was crystal clear, and I mean crystal clear!

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Within a minute or two, a dark ominous shape appeared below the surface.  It wasn’t just its length that struck me, it was its girth and its almost effortless grace as it broke the surface a few feet in front of the cages.  This was unlike any other shark I had ever seen.  As I fought against my wetsuit, the crew prepared huge, heavy lead harnesses four or five times the weight I would normally use for scuba diving.  The idea was to pin us to the bottom of the cage so we could not bounce around and bang into the cage or each other with every movement of the vessel.  Climbing through the top of the cage I was handed one of the yellow spaghetti hooker rigs to breath from as I went in.  The water is an initial shock at 68 degrees but nothing like the temperature in the 50’s at many of the other great white destinations around the world.  Grabbing my camera I dropped to the floor of the cage and turned, looking out through its 2’ camera opening.  There was a great white shark headed straight for the cage!

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Fear never entered my mind.  I honestly believe that would have been the case even without the “man can.”  My first feelings were that of awe.  I realized that what I wanted to shoot was right in front of me, not the gnashing teeth or the distended feeding jaws.  It was her force of presence that impressed me more than anything else.  Here was this living thing that projected such a feeling of strength and power without even opening its mouth.  I couldn’t help but draw an instant parallel to photographing alpha male lions in Africa.  With a single look at the camera, those massive thick-maned beasts can radiate such a feeling of control doing nothing more than sitting in one spot.  The same was true for the great white.  She came within a few feet of the cage with as much effort as it would’ve taken me to form a benign thought.  The sunlight rippled across her gray sandy back like the spotlight reserved for a great queen or empress.  Her right eye looking straight at me she was simultaneously acknowledging my presence and assessing my place in the world that surrounded her.  The eye was not the empty black hole I was expecting.  It was shades of brown—an almost amber disk with a bright ring surrounding a smaller inner pupil.

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I felt such a sense of understanding and calculation coming from her as she passed.   From the tip of her snout, tiny black holes in the skin called ampullae of Lorenzini peppered her head punctuated by two nasal orifices.  These ampullae are actually small tubes connecting electrically sensitive cells to the flow of water over the snout.  As she pivoted her massive body around from her mid section her head swung in wide arcs collecting information in the form of electrical impulses and smells down to minuscule parts per million.  Combine that with her sophisticated, warm-blooded eyes and brain and she was a giant, data collecting machine constantly analyzing every inch of her surroundings—including me in the cage with the giant electric field of my camera and perhaps even the small electrical force being produced by my pounding heart.

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A trait that all of the great white sharks I saw that day had in common was their heavily scarred bodies.  Some of them were missing entire gill covers.  At first I thought they were mating scars common to many species of sharks generally found just behind the pectoral fins where the smaller males hold on to the females during copulation.  But immense battle wounds covered these sharks from around their eyes all the way to their tails.  A local researcher explained that they were the result of territorial disputes between the sharks.  It must be like a scene from a Michael Bay Transformers movie when two of these animals well into the thousands of pounds equipped with some of the most effective killing tools on the planet going head-to- head over a productive piece of elephant seal infested beach head.

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The last and most impressive thing of all was the great white’s power plant.  On the large females the base of the tail was as thick around as a large tree trunk suddenly splitting into the twin, almost evenly sized lobes of the tail fin.  There was no mistaking that this bundle of muscle and size of tail were made to push a big mass very, very fast.  I got to see just how fast on a later dive when for some unknown reason a great white rocketed from depths below my range of visibility to just a foot or two below the surface in what was literally fractions of a second.  Satellite tag telemetry has recorded these animals at 40 miles per hour.  Yes, that is faster than a blue marlin!

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The surface cages provided some great images with epic natural light but within a few hours the sharks seemed to avoid the top cages and circled in groups of two or three about 30’ below the boat.  We switched to the smaller, circular deep cage.  This cage was lowered by crane to around 40’ below the boat, so that meant switching between surface supplied air to SCUBA.  This had its pro and cons.  With the crane arm extended well over the side of the boat every movement of the boat was amplified and sent down the cable to the little “man can” below.  It felt like being in the drum of a clothes dryer set to “tumble.”  It was very difficult to get a shot hanging out of the bars while being jerked around like a five-year-old’s yo-yo.

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From the moment I had arrived onboard I had been hounding the operator of the ship to see if he’d allow me out of the cage.  I would sign whatever it took and do what ever he needed done, just to get out and into the water free of the bars.  The bottom line is that there is photo group who regularly books the boat paying a VERY large premium to work outside the cage.  So if I wanted out I was going to have to pay to join one of their trips, something that will happen during the first cold day in hell.  This meant I was stuck in my rattling mailbox for this trip, without fins.  Fins were not permitted in the cages and without them there was no way to leave the cage.  I finally resorted to sitting on the roof of the cage or standing on the top bars far enough out to get a clear shot.  As much as being in the cages sucked, being grumpy about it was not helping, so it was time to apply rule #6 again and get over myself.  I remember at one stage thinking the cages weren’t that bad when there were five different sharks swimming irregular laps around little ol’ me by myself at 40’, especially when you keep in mind that these animals specialize in decapitating thousand pound elephant seals in one bite.  I think at that stage if I had been out of the cage I probably wouldn’t have been spending much time with my eye stuck in the viewfinder.

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The deep cage experience was very different, but with the negatives came the perks.  With the great visibility it felt as though you were flying through this spectacular set built for the Cirque du Soleil.  Rays of afternoon sun penetrated way past the cage into the navy blue black below.  This provided an almost theatrical light as the backdrop for these incredible beasts to swim sometimes barely out of touch in an x, y, or z axis all around.  Above, thousands of baitfish fluttered around the top cages like a massive octopus whose arms sometimes reached as deep as the cage in a display of darting silver fish.  On one dive, several sixty to eighty pound tuna joined us trying to feed on the bait, as well as sea lions that would antagonize the sharks by performing acrobatic displays within a few feet of their noses.  But it was the sharks that were the main attraction, on occasion arriving in a group passing one to the left, one to the right, as another cruised below almost scraping its dorsal fin on the floor of the cage.  The view was both spectacular and inspiring at the same time.

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As the sun dropped behind the tall cliffs on the last day, as with the previous three, the cages were hauled aboard and lashed down and gear was rinsed for the final time.  I sat on the top deck with a cold Mexican cerveza, typing my last 41-character satellite message on my SPOT tracker. “I’m coming home, fantastic trip,” it said.  This as we passed out of the wind shadow of the island into the open ocean greeted by a snotty sea and stiff, cold, northwesterly winds.  Those few letters flying up to space and back said it best.  It was a fantastic trip.  The experience had been supremely satisfying.  I had watched and photographed an animal that I never seen before, and I’d done it from inside a cage—an experience I’d previously dismissed.   But as soon as I applied rule #6 and just went and did it, I was rewarded with a tremendous feeling of awe and humility at being in the presence of one of the most awesome creatures on this planet.

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What a day on the water.  The weather was magnificent, the ocean like a lake, the fish were coming in hot, and I decided to insert my head…  you know where.  Just dumb, dumb, dumb on my part all day.  I came here to get a motor drive sequence of an unhooked sailfish which I did on the second day.  Since then we’ve been trying to up the ante.  I’m now looking for a shot of a fish hitting a fly, cast from the boat, underwater.  With Jamie behind the fly rod, Jose in the tower and the teasing demons, Marco and Maco, we went after it today.  I pulled the “goalie”, Luke the videographer, so as to reduce the spook factor with another diver in the water.  Changed tactics by moving my “get in” spot from the transom to half way up the boat’s gunwhale behind the fly being cast.  The idea was that as Jamie’s fly was coming forward from the back cast I would jump in passing the transom as the sail was about to eat the fly.  As I said, dumb, dumb, dumb on all points.

Back on the boat we ran post game under the shade of the hard top and the verdict was obvious.  I was neglecting every well established play and my ego was trying to throw 3 pointers from mid-court.  More than ever I realized that without every single person on that boat I was about as useful as a two legged bar stool.  I was getting in too early from the wrong part of the boat, trying for the hero shot at six knots as the sails are heading at six knots in the oppersite direction, hoping the guy on the teasers could throw 300-foot hail mary’s on the teasers to make up for my screw ups.  As the photographer I’m nothing more than the fancy umbrella on a tropical drink, the real punch is in the bottom of the glass. Tomorrow it’s back to basics.

Frenzy Sport fishing

Day 1. We woke to clear, sunny skies and flat seas.  On the ride out I proceeded to drop my new Kaenon sunglasses over the side (they don’t float).  While cleaning my mask the right lens popped out, hit the transom running board, and joined the Kaenons over the side.  Finally, after a few hours of wear, the arm broke off my backup Ocean Waves sunglasses.  Ever get the feeling that someone is trying to tell you something?

The weather came and went as a mix of ominous clouds, rain showers, and bright blue skies. We raised five fish, the first about 30 seconds after having the teasers out while still running drills getting use to each other as a team.  All the fish seemed less than aggressive apart from one who spooked and stayed his distance as soon as we got in.  We are getting there.  Day one was a great opportunity to warm up.

The biggest disapointment of the day was the 3D Go Pro system.  It must have been in the small print which I missed, but you can’t use any Go Pro product underwater unless the housings are modified with a flat port by a third party company.  The focus is as blunt as a bad talk show host and basically a non-starter due to focus.  There is a third party mod which will allow underwater focus, but this doesn’t help  me in Costa Rica.  The issue is with the tiny dome ports and minimum focusing distance of the lens. I’m working on a backyard rig to try and get focus but, for what it was billed as, the standard Go Pro housing sucks underwater unless, of course, you use brail daily in which case you will love the results.

We got back to Casa Carolina, cleaned up, and headed to dinner at one of the most famous spots in town, the Grande Escape–a fishing bar and grill of the “you hook ‘em and we cook ‘em” vein.  We were off to see Marsha Bennet.  As famous as the bar itself, Marsha is the place.  When I hung out here 18 plus years ago, this spot was my home away from home and Marsha a great friend. It was my kitchen, beer joint, and general hang out after getting off the water.  It took her a few moments to recognize me but as soon as she did it was as if I had never left.  Dinner was full of remember whens and whos and not without the latest Harry Gray story. Even though he’s been dead for 11 years, he is still part of this town. Harry was a big part of the early, heady days of bill fishing on fly here in Quepos. Apart from being an incredible saltwater fly fisherman and holder of numerous world records, Harry was one of those characters it’s hard to forget.  I was very lucky to have gotten to fish with him.  That is a day I will never forget.  It was Harry’s stories–like the one about feeding blue marlin by hand from the transom in Venezulela–that make me think that what I do today was made possible by guys like him.

Pacific sail attacking the hookless teaser.

Day 2 began as rain and dark clouds.  From the time I woke up  I could feel the pressure to get the shot building up in my chest.  The dark and wet start to the day didn’t help.  Here we were in the perfect spot, on the perfect boat with the perfect crew and I was still panicking.  I think Jamie could see my stress.  Sunday’s fish just hadn’t done what I expected and now there was no light.  We headed south and put teasers in not far off Ile Dos Canas, then weaved between dark squawling patches and lighter ones looking like holes of gray.  @$%&!!!

Teased fish demolishing the teaser right in front of the lens.

I retired to the bow to sulk at my “bad luck”.  It’s not fair, I thought.  Two minutes later Luke and I were going over the transom on a lit up sail shopping the spread like a Walmart Rollback sale.  Seconds later I had him, Fathom teaser in his mouth, motor drive firing like a machine gun and 3 feet from the lens in the only patch of light for miles around now streaming like at spotlight from a celestial window behind the boat. Jamie, Marc, and Moca where lighting up the cockpit with the most high-energy acrobatic teasing moves I later got to see in the cockpit camera mount (see the short video here). I got out of the water thinking we had been with the fish for two or three mintues.  We replayed the time code on the tape, it was over seven minutes. That was one special fish.  Thanks, Harry.

We later got in with a small blue marlin and got a few snaps but it’s all about the drive sequence of the first sail that day.  I remember thinking that If I had to leave now I had what I had come for.  The Pacific coast of Costa Rica is alive with some of the most incredable bio mass imaginable. Case in point, a 20′ piece of bamboo we found floating that afternoon.  I jumped into take a look and was surrounded in clouds of bait fish, chubs, blue runner, the list seemed endless.  Add to that mantas, dolphins, and two loggerhead turtles.  Luke and I were able to shoot some great stills and video just to round off a fantastic day.

Bamboo Island

Triggers under the log.

At Casa Carolina it was back to downloading images, capturing video, and social networking until almost midnight.  I slept well!

Day 3.  We were up and off under bright warm skies and a sea that was as calm as an oil slick.  With clean water and a mirror finish to the surface I thought we would try the spear gun I had bought with me to implant research tags into an unhooked fish while underwater.  The morning bite bought us six sails, one of which was a double but I was not on form with either the camera or tag gun.  Technical issues lead to the mess of out-of-focus images on the best fish of the morning.  The others just seemed spooked when I got in with the tag gun.  I got one last-second shot off at a sail that was on its way out of the spread, shooting the tag and spear over his back and missing the tag box completely.  Back in the locker room I’m now analyzing the game’s play by play stats and must take responsibility for the score.  Getting in to the water too soon, not paying attention to small camera details, and generally being off focus with the tags lead to the final: Sails 6, Occhio 0 for the day.

Luke Pearson, the videographer, covered up in life under the log.

With the bite dead after lunch, Jose the captain heard about a massive log a few miles away.  These floating “islands”  attract life for miles.  From boobie birds to turtles and large preditory fish there to feed on the bait this log was a bustling metropolis floating 30 miles from the coast.  The crew put a few mahi and yellow fin in the fish box for dinner while the rest of us floated around the structure completely surrounded in more species of fish than we could count.  A large loggerhead pulled up to the log and was completely inundated by a host of different fish spices.  He became this floating MacDonald’s drive through serving an all day menu of delicious algae, parasites and crustaceans that cling to his shell.  I slowly drifted over and joined the crowd picking at him.  I picked loose some large barnacles around his neck and scratched at the toupee of red algae growing onto of his head.  His shell rolled off level and he closed his eyes pushing his harder against my scratching hand.  He was one very happy floating camper.  After my ocean community service I stopped beating myself up over the crappy performance of the morning and just enjoyed the moment.  We are halfway through the trip and already have what we came for.  Life is good.

The Frenzy pulling up to the floating Island.

A big loggerhead arrives at the log for cleaning.

We made it! We arrived gear and crew intact.  Luke Pearson and I met Jamie and Jenny Walker for the 14 minute flight on the King Air out of San Jose.  The last leg of the trip brought us in over the tropical rain forest of the southern Pacific coast of Costa Rica.  The forest was steamy with low clouds and rain but it’s warm rain with no wind. I was last here almost 20 years ago and so much has obviously changed, then again there is a lot that is exactly the same.  From there it was up and down the winding road through Quepos, past the Grande Escape restaurant, and over the hill to Casa Carolina in Manual Antonio.  The house is paradise in every sense of the word.  WOW, where do I start?

Casa Carolina is set back in the tropical vegetation, surrounded by palms and lush plants, it blends perfectly with its natural surroundings but at the same time remains grand.  The view is mind blowing across the tree tops and down over the bay.  Oh, and did I mention the fishing here is awesome too?  We just got today’s report from the boat: 5 sails and a blue marlin. Jamie and Jenny Walker are consummate hosts, Willy the Frenzy Sportfishing manager, and the staff are fun and relaxed.  We weren’t here 10 minutes before we were digging into Elizabeth’s freshly made guacamole and salsa.  I’m running out of superlatives so I’ll call it quits and go back to my cold Imperial, prepping cameras, and talking tactics with the crew.  Thanks to Luke for a few frame grabs from the video footage.  I’m one happy guy.

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I love tarpon! They are this wild, prehistoric cross between a sardine and a shark that look as though they are made of intricately welded, polished stainless steel plates. They’d be quite at home in a Salvador Dali painting. Generally, they are pretty docile, lying like logs in large schools. The most exciting thing is to see them feed. In a few thousandths of a second, a tarpon can open its slim, upturned mouth into a massive, cavernous hole and swallow anything within a foot with a percussive BANG! This fraction of a second shot of a tarpon with its mouth open, gills flared, is what I’ve come to Grand Cayman to shoot.

Selecting the location was a no brainer. There is a restaurant called The Wharf on the west side of Grand Cayman, which has a small jetty protruding from its sea wall. It has large lights that illuminate the crystal clear, shallow water below. Each night restaurant staffers feed the tarpon that collect under the lights. My plan was to mount flashes out over the water and try to catch the fish in aerial displays while they competed for food and capture that moment.

I always try to not get too caught up in talking about camera technology. In the words of Lance Armstrong, “It’s not about the bike.” However, once in a while something will come along that makes me go, “Ah-HA!” One such technology that’s actually been around a while is high-speed sync with Canon’s proprietary E-TTL function. Without getting too technical, I need a very high shutter speed or a very short flash duration in order to freeze action. Generally flashes and cameras don’t work well together with shutter speeds greater than 1/250 of a second due to the front and rear curtain design of the DSLR shutters. Canon came up with the solution to fire the strobe in conjunction with shutters up to 1/6400 by firing the flashes a number of times very quickly during the exposure. Problem being the amount of light I need means just one flash is not enough.

Keep in mind this is a vast over simplification, but basically for what I needed to do I needed 8 Canon 580EXII flashes, 7 slave flashes being directed by one master. I wanted to fire this gang of flashes both above and below the water. To ensure clear communication between all the flashes I connected them to one another using fiber optic cables to transfer the infrared signal necessary to determine the exposure by controlling the duration of the flashes. I cut the connectors off the ends of the fiber optic cables and epoxyed them into small plumbing fittings to create a stable cable “window” to attach to the front of the flash’s sensors. I then bought a pool net, cut out the net and mounted 6 of the flashes on the remaining plastic frame. I kept one flash for use in an underwater housing and another mounted on a separate pole as a small rim light to make the flying droplets of water pop. The ring of flashes was attached to a pool pole and suspended 6 feet out over the water with the rim light a little lower and a foot behind.

I had lived in the Cayman Islands on and off for almost 12 years and am lucky enough to still have a few friends there. For the next part of the shoot I needed a GOOD friend to act as tarpon wrangler and dangle strips of fish a few feet over the water to entice the tarpon to jump. I engaged the talents of my old friend Mike Nelson to risk life and limb to get the fish clear of the water for the shot. The fish range in size from 40 to 100 pounds which, although small as far as tarpon go, are still large enough to hurt if they swallowed your hand and forearm in a strike attempt! (This I know from personal experience). If you think you’re fast enough to clear your hand in time, think again. The tarpon slowly move under the bait and from an almost horizontal position can launch themselves vertically, completely clear of the water faster than you can blink. It was that explosive fraction of a second I wanted to capture.

I started shooting from underwater with the Canon 1D Mark IV in a Sea&Sea housing. The housing was on the end of a pole because I couldn’t get anywhere near the water without the tarpon getting spooked. I would release the shutter with a Pocket Wizard radio that I had had converted to work remotely from the housing. The 580 EXII flash was in a housing and was connected to the camera housing. It acted as the master control flash, with fiber optic cables connected to the front of it running up to the surface flashes ganged above. The initial underwater results were disappointing. Even when I was able to capture a strike it looked like a ball of bubbles with a tail sticking out. It was time to reassess the shot and move to the above water portion of the hit. Taking the camera out of the housing and switching to a Canon 100-400mm lens and backing 100 feet away we started getting what we needed! The gang of 8 lights allowed me to shoot the action at 1/3200 of a second, literally freezing everything.

Every droplet was stopped and every detail of the fish frozen in time. The water took on a diamond-like sparkle and the tarpon’s large, wide-open eyes showed a demonic red flare as the flashes reflected off the fish’s retina. Tarpon are often described a large silver fish, but with the quality of the light produced by the multiple flashes, delicate hues of green, gold, and magenta become obvious. In the frozen frames the powerful dynamics of the fishes’ fins sculpt the water in lined patterns as they clear the surface. It’s only at that shutter speed that we can see this secret, hidden part of the fish’s life.

Red Hook

The wind has howled non-stop since Tuesday, pushing the seas to a very bouncy 6 to 8 ft.  Yesterday we took a break from the body bashing and enjoyed a day snorkeling and scuba diving.  With seas that rough jumping overboard for in water shots becomes tricky and dangerous.  It’s more the crawling through the marlin door in the transom than anything else.  In 8-foot seas the entry through the high transom goes from eye level to high above your head in an instant, revealing the shiny, sharp blades of propellors and rudders.  Needless to say, I spent today in the boat, my long 400mm lens attached.  Fishing has slowed for this time of year, slow being a relative term, with most boats releasing one or two blues.  The first of our fish gave us a dramatic aerial display just before being released. The second went more quietly.  Although I enjoy the excitement of trying for those marlin jump shots, I’m getting very antsy to get back in the water and have another shot at a blue below the surface.  The wind is starting to drop and tomorrow is a new day.

Rise and Shine

Cut Back

Upside Down