Meet underwater photographer Stephen Frink in this story from WPBT South Florida PBS.
READ THE SCRIPT:
[Stephen] I can't tell you how many queen angelfish I've photographed over the years, but this is the one that of all of them resonates more, and I think it's because the fish has personality. My name is Stephen Frink. I'm an underwater photographer from Key Largo, Florida. I travel the world for underwater photography, but this is my hometown. I'm also the publisher of Alert Diver magazine.
The fish was just turning into me, and I had a 100 millimeter macro lens on it, and it was able to lock into focus, and the eye contact is really good, too. It's not like I had to chase this animal. I was there, he came to me, we had a moment, and he was gone.
For marine life photography, I think proximity is one of the most important things, and I think you have to be able to project a benign presence. You have to approach the animal in a fashion so they're not threatened, so that means not moving too fast so that you don't push a big force field of water. They have to believe in you, and we also have to think, know a little bit about the behavior, so that we know that a butterflyfish, for example, is probably gonna be looking for a little crevice to find little crustaceans and things of that nature. If you know a little bit about the fish, it can predict where they may be, and you can place yourself in that position.
There's an area where a fish may flee, the field of flight, so I set everything before I enter the field of flight, so I'll set the aperture or the shutter speed. I'll think in my mind's eye, how is this photo meant to look? Where should my strobes be, so I try to do all of those things hypothetically from about six feet away so I'm not inside that field of flight.
People maybe think that I dive all the time. I don't, but I dive a lot in chunks of time. I'll get on an airplane, and I'll go somewhere, and I'll dive real heavy for two weeks. I typically pick destinations by what it's particularly good for. For example, if I want to shoot great white sharks, I would either go to Guadalupe in Mexico or South Australia.
I think I spent many years looking at the photography of other people and looking at the composition, and I think how did they do that? So long as you have, I think, a good camera and good lights, because color doesn't really exist underwater in the absence of artificial light. Once you have the tools, you can get a serviceable photograph. I think what transcends a serviceable photograph into art is composition, and the eye of the artist.
I teach underwater photo seminars, and that's probably the hardest thing.
And what about color?
Awareness that we try to bring to my students at the outset that, that no photograph is worth damaging the marine environment. It should be no surprise to anybody that the oceans of the world are in trouble. There's just so many things that are affecting the ocean that a visual communicator can bring to editorial awareness.
One of the things that I think is really brilliant about the whole Florida Keys, particularly the Upper Keys, When you have a marine protected area, the fish trust the divers. They know that we're not here to spear them. We're not here to pull them kicking and screaming out of the water to a dinner plate.
I think in terms of the future of underwater photography, I think we're at a threshold, so what's going to happen to make underwater photography better? For as heavy and bulky as these housings are, if it got smaller, that would be good.
I think it's become far more democratic. One of the reasons that when I opened my studio here, I did well renting cameras was because nobody had them. In the morning, I would rent my camera, and if nobody rented it, I'd go diving, so that's how I started here.
It's exciting. If it were not for underwater photography, I wouldn't be a diver today because I'd be bored, but I'm never, ever bored diving because even though it's a, let's say a French angel, and I've shot 12,000 French angelfish in my life. This one's different, but there's still really, really inspiring things.