Remotely Operated Photography

Staff · Issue 19, Jun/Jul 2004 · pp. 31–35

Products mentioned: Kongsberg Simrad oe14-208 digital colour still camera, Kongsberg oe11-242 flash, Kongsberg GUI

31 On average, the ocean is 3800 metres deep. It covers 71% of the earth’s surface and 88% of it is deeper than 1000m. I’ve never been able to comprehend such a volume of water, such a volume of habitat. As a diver I rarely take photos deeper than 30m, that’s less than 1% of the average depth. Technical divers are a bit more adventurous than I am and they may take pictures as deep as about 100m, which is not even 1% of the maximum depth of the ocean. It’s fair to say that diving photographers are only just scratching the surface. We humans are visual creatures, 40% of the sensory inputs to our cortex are from our eyes. We also have an inexorable curiosity about the world around us. So just having images from the top 1% of the ocean is fundamentally unsatisfying! Marine scientists have been bringing back images from the deep for many years, but they have always been scarce. Submersibles a…