Posted by Franko on June 23, 2002 at 17:33:56:
Brad wrote a screen or two down (I was out of town for a couple of days, so I pulled this response up here):
"FrankO, you are the only other freediver/u/w photographer that i know of. Any chance we could see some of your stuff?"
To be honest I haven't shot anything since that Two Harbors trip in May (URL is somewhere a few screenfuls down). I did buy a new strobe and set of extension tubes that I hope to try out ASAP. I'll be going over to Casino Point next weekend and plan to shoot at least a couple of rolls. Also will be going to Hawaii in July and hope to shoot quite a bit.
I did freedive Saturday at Crystal Cove in Orange County. Okay vis (10-12 feet), a few of the usual fish. Ran into one decent-sized lobster in a hole in a rock reef in 10 feet of water. He was ready to whip out a calendar and/or marine preserve notice to display to me, but probably realized that like you I don't have a fishing license. I didn't want to drag my Nikonos through the sand, so I was just sightseeing.
Incidentally, on the topic of freedive photography I just finished reading two books by Carlos Eyles. He was quite a freediver spearfisher from the 1950s through '80s, when he got a nasty case of ciguatera in Fiji that left him unable to eat any seafood. He thereupon put away his gun and got into photography big-time. He now lives in Kona and teaches freediving. You might enjoy his books if you can get around the hunting aspect, which is woven pretty much throughout. The ones I just read were "Last of the Blue Water Hunters" (covering his early diving in Laguna, a late-'60s trip to the Sea of Cortez, and a summer spent anchored on west end Catalina living off what he could catch); and "The Blue Edge" (covering his ciguatera experience, conversion to photography, and a mid-1990s trip back to the Sea of Cortez and to St. Benedicto Island in the Revillagigedos).
Frank