My son, Randall is an avid scuba diver, and certified to dive in underwater caves. He enjoys one of the most dangerous types of scuba diving, underwater cave exploration. You'll see many of these photos are incorrectly exposed, but when a diver needs to concentrate on not making a fatal error, instead of joining the many others who have died in this sport, he should occupy his mind with things other than getting the proper photo exposure!
Underwater caves are pitch dark, even being the habitat of some strange, blind fish without any eyes. Underwater caves have a floor lined with a deep layer of silt deposited over the millennia. If a scuba diver disturbs this silt, it'll cloud the water making it opaque. For a diver to find his way out of the cave under those conditions is impossible without his guide line. Thus, a cave scuba diver always reels out a line to guide him to the cave's entrance. To lose this line can be fatal, so a scuba diver in a cave never loses hold of the line.
In the US, the only location of desirable cave diving is in the state, Florida. Thus Florida is the location of most, US, cave diving. These photos we therefore all taken in a Florida cave feeding Florida's Peacock Springs with underground water. Underwater caves contain many awe-inspiring formations, but the photographer here (not my son) was less interested in showing these than showing in other cave divers. Thus, to a non-scuba diver, the following series of photos might seem uninteresting, but to a cave diver, seeing photos of other divers in a cave and examining his equipment in the photo is interesting. Randall tells me that some fish will follow his cave light into the cave to eat the blind fish, but these fish rarely follow him back out, and die in the darkness of the cave. |