David Doubilet, an underwater photographer for National Geographic, discusses his first-hand experience with how ocean stressors negatively impact the aquatic environment.

Earthjustice staffer Jessica Knoblauch speaks with David Doubilet, an acclaimed underwater photographer for National Geographic.

Doubilet has spent decades photographing underwater images and has seen first-hand how ocean stressors have negatively impacted the aquatic environment he loves. In this conversation, Doubilet speaks about the changes he's seen to the ocean over the past twenty years, particularly the effects that climate change is having on coral reefs. He also discusses his time as an underwater photographer and explorer for National Geographic.

Jessica Knoblauch: David, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. What made you want to first pick up a camera and document the underwater world?

David Doubilet: Well I began to go underwater actually strangely enough not very far away from where we live now in a small lake in the Adirondack Mountains. I was at summer camp. I was a terrible camper. I hated the horse; I hated the mountains; I didn't like to hike. And the counselor said, "Why don't you try this mask and go underwater? Put your head underwater and look under the dock." I put on a French blue rubber mask, I put my head underwater, and everything that I knew about in life completely changed. Here was an entire world completely different than the world we live in, the world of gravity and air. And it was mind-altering, even for an eight year old, and I knew that this was the direction that I wanted to go in.

There's a certain amount of hypnotic quality to being underwater. You're in a world that's weightless. You're in a world of—if you're in the Caribbean, or the Mediterranean or the Pacific, blue; if you're off the coast of New Jersey, green, or right off the coast of California, relatively green. (Actually off the coast of New Jersey is more brown than green, where I grew up.) And what you see underwater is most of the life in [on] the planet.

You have to think of this planet, really, as a water planet, not as a land planet. So Earthjustice may have to change its name in some ways to OceanJustice to really cover our planet as best as possible. It really is the heart and soul of what life is. In this very, very empty, very, very dark universe, here's this one tiny orb that glows blue. And the color of life, obviously, life as we know it, is blue.

Jessica: So you've been taking underwater pictures since the 1970s. What kinds of changes have you seen in the aquatic environment since you first started?

David: There's been a lot of sweeping changes that I've seen. Specifically, let's take the Caribbean. A lot of it may have to do with basic changes in ocean chemistry and ocean environments, but in the Caribbean a lot of the sea urchins disappeared. In the Caribbean, almost all of the elkhorn coral, these great brown corals, they've disappeared, almost all of them. There are very few corals like that. But mostly it's the fish. When I grew up along the coast of New Jersey, there were great schools, sweeping schools of menhaden. And one family running one set of fishing boats basically wiped out an entire tribe of fish along the coast of New Jersey. And that was menhaden. In the Caribbean, you go onto an average Caribbean reef and you don't see the big sweeping schools of grunts and snappers and all of the things that used to course over a reef top. They're mostly gone, overfished and fished out.

Bar Jacks, in the Cayman Islands.
(© David Doubilet / daviddoubilet.com)

Other fish have disappeared like bluefin tuna. In 1978, I did a story for National Geographic on blue fin tuna in St. Margaret's Bay. There they set up a set of pound nets, pound nets that have been in St. Margaret's Bay to catch mackerel since the American Revolution. St. Margaret's Bay is just south of Halifax in Nova Scotia. Blue fin tuna are born in the Gulf of Mexico. They grow and then they begin sweep around the entire east coast of the United States following the path of the Gulf Stream and turn around the top of the North Atlantic with the fingers of the Gulf Stream as they go by and return as gyre years later.

What happens in St. Margaret's Bay is that groups of them would eventually go into these mackerel nets and be caught, and the mackerel fishermen there would not quite understand what these huge fish were. They would call them horse mackerel and some of them were basically cut up and used for fertilizer. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Japanese discovered this and they put pound nets around the mackerel nets and impounded the blue fin tuna that were accidentally caught. There was no change. It was like a specific scientific sampling of these great fish. There was no change in the numbers caught. They didn't increase the numbers. But meanwhile, long line fishing in the goal of Mexico, very active fishing up and down the east coast, and a desire for blue fin tuna, which grew and grew and grew until it was basically one of the most expensive fish in the sea, if not the most expensive fish in the sea, caused the numbers in St. Margaret's Bay to plunge. So I shot pictures in 1979 and by 1985, most of those fish were gone.

Jessica: That's amazing. Well in addition to overfishing, of course one of the environmental problems of our time is climate change and so far much of the focus in the media has been on changes on land, like an increase in wildfires and droughts. By now we're all familiar with the image of a polar bear on a solitary ice floe, but for you what does climate change look like in the depths of the ocean? What image comes to mind?

David: It's very hard to photograph climate change on a coral reef, but that is the other front line of where this earth and this climate is changing. It's not just the poles and the disappearing of the polar bears and the fact that we now have rain on the Antarctic Peninsula, imagine that. But there's a much more insidious situation that's going on right now within the ocean because of climate change and, more specifically, the enormous amount of CO2 that we're putting into the atmosphere, which is absorbed into the sea. And this packing of CO2 into the ocean has basically re-arranged and changed the chemistry of the ocean.

Now how this affects the coral reefs is the fact that all corals develop a calcium-carbonate house, a little tiny house that they live in. A coral reef is basically a biological action that produces a geological fact. And it's all done by a creature smaller than an infant's fingernail, the coral polyp. And as the coral polyp goes to work, it builds this wonderful calcium carbonate house and then dies, and then the next coral polyp builds another house on top of it. So you have these massive unbelievable cities in the warm belt of the sea, stretching from the heart of all coral density and biodiversity, which is in Indonesia, all the way across the Pacific, all the way across the Indian Ocean, up into the Red Sea and into the Caribbean, like a great warm belt of water all populated by these little coral polyps.

And what happens is that ocean acidification inhibits the ability for the coral polyp to build these calcium carbonate houses. And eventually, according to Dr. J. E. N. Veron, aka Charlie Veron—formerly of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, he is one of the leading, if not the leading coral experts in the world—he has predicted that the Great Barrier Reef within 30 years will begin to change considerably and by the end of this century, will be gone as we know it. That's a hell of a prediction and right now scientists working out of One Tree Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef in the Capricorn bunker group have looked into long-term acidification studies done in 1976 and are redoing the same studies and finding numbers that are very, very frightening.

Because of the way we're living on this planet, we're looking at the total destruction of coral reefs as well as the melting of the polar ice caps and the changing of the entire environments there. Last winter, Jennifer Hayes, my partner and my wife, and I were photographing in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and for the last few years the Gulf of St. Lawrence has not been a place where there's been great sheets of ice. We were photographing harp seals this year. The harp seal population was giving birth on pancake ice not much larger than a tennis court, if that. Toward the end of the season, instead of the pups surviving, a large southern storm came up, dissipated the ice and an entire year's group of pups drowned. It was a great change in climate in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was a great change in the Antarctic Peninsula where we last year saw rain. And, of course, the reefs.

Jessica: So it sounds like you're an eyewitness to these changes going on within the ocean. When did you first get involved with spreading awareness on the state of the ocean? Do you consider an activist or merely a photographic journalist or do you make that distinction?

Creation of an artificial reef.
(© David Doubilet / daviddoubilet.com)

David: Well, lines are very blurred these days between being a simple photographer and an activist. I think primarily the job of the photographer is to make images that are compelling. Before you protect anything, you have to know exactly what is going on and what is there to protect. If you look at why we have, for instance, Yosemite Park, it's in many cases because of the ability of Ansel Adam's pictures to communicate the absolute beauty of this place. And his pictures have very, very long legs in terms of the aesthetics and strength. And that's what a photographer's job is to make an image that turns people around. But if you go into a situation and say, "I have to make these pictures because I have to illustrate the importance of this place and protect it," you may be limiting yourself to how you see something.

We need two types of pictures. We need the picture of the smoking fish and we need the picture of the fish itself. Both of them work to change people's attitudes. The biggest problem in photography and in the way we approach everything is that we end up convincing the convinced. The hardest job is to convince the unconvinced.

Jessica: Well and I know that Earthjustice struggles with that issue as well. You mentioned the case of Yosemite and bringing awareness to preserving places like that. Because the world is covered mostly in water, but we're land-based animals, I think it's easy for people to forget about the ocean. What effect do you hope that your underwater photography will have on people's perceptions of the marine environment?

David: Hopefully if people look at the images that both Jennifer and I make underwater, they will look at a place in an entirely different light. They will say, "Wait a minute. This is part of our planet. This is an extraordinary part of our planet." The coral reef is a tapestry of biodiversity. It's more like a Jackson Pollack painting of life. It's a jewel on our planet, and they're going to be gone.

The polar seas are the engines of weather on our planet. So when you have vast wildfires and freezing winters in Texas, it is climate change, and it will be caused by this enormous amount of CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere. I wish it wasn't true. It's like a Damoclean sword hanging over all of our heads. And, for a lifetime that I spent photographing underwater I've always imagined that there's going to be something more, something astounding in the future and the future of other photographers and generations to come. Now I'm afraid that a lot of the images that I've made underwater are going to be documents of a time passed—and that's a frightening thought

Jessica: You mentioned your wife and partner, Jennifer Hayes. She's an aquatic biologist and photographer as well. How did you guys first meet?

David: We met basically working in the Bahamas. I was set down there on assignment to photograph shark research that Professor "Sonny" Gruber out of the University of Miami was doing in the Bahamas. So we met in the field. We try to do everything together. She shoots as well as writes. It's a total team effort. It's something that I think is so important to our lives.

Jessica: And one of the recent things that you guys did together was you recently put out a children's book about sharks, correct? It's called Face to Face with Sharks. I was thinking, typically children's books tend to be about things like giving trees or dogs named Marley, not so much about animals that they make scary movies about, like Jaws. So why did you decide to focus on sharks for a children's book?

David: Well for kids sharks may be the new dinosaurs. The only difference is that they're around right now, or sort of around right now. We have a lot of kids that come up to us and can identify every single shark that exists, all 350 species, and know their habits and everything else about them. Sharks are fascinating. They are monsters. They are something that humans have an atavistic and very ancient fear of, which means that they are totally fascinating. A crocodile eats somebody in South Africa and it never makes the front page. A shark eats a surfer in South Africa and it gets worldwide attention.

Lemon sharks, Bahamas.
(© David Doubilet / daviddoubilet.com)

It's very strange. They still have that incredible pull. They're basically the last dinosaur, one of the few species that can swallow a human whole, just about. That being said, we're facing a time and a place on this planet where sharks may very well disappear. In some cases, 90 percent of the population has been taken away, destroyed. And across the Pacific there are great swatches of areas, great reef systems where you don't even see a shark, like in Raja Ampat. We dove in Raja Ampat in the very heart, in the very richest coral environment in the world, which is in the western tip of New Guinea and the eastern most province of Indonesia. It's the richest coral environment in the world as I said before, but in the six months and countless expeditions we've been there, we've seen sharks on the reef about four times.

They've all been taken away for one specific reason and that's the shark fin soup trade. Sharks worldwide are decimated because of this. When you take a shark population out of a system it doesn't come back. They're slow-breeding, slow-to-mature creatures, and when you do such a thing those populations don't bounce back.

A great white shark is a fearsome, wondrous beast, but to look at one face-to-face underwater is terrific. They're huge, elegant creatures, and, of course, when they open their mouth they really can fit a person in there completely. If they test bite somebody, you die. And they don't come after humans. They'd rather eat a lot of other things, like seals or fish or everything else. And unfortunately if you go under the water where great white sharks are, there's a chance you may be eaten.

Jessica: You've obviously photographed sharks all over the world. Do you ever get scared

David: Well, what's scary is to get into a situation and as a photographer miss the picture. That's sort of frightening. But not really. There are situations where it can be very tense and then the thing to do is you back slowly out of the situation. At other times, it can be absolutely beautiful, breathtaking. Diving with sharks is not necessarily always going to end up with injuries. You just have to be very, very careful.

For instance, we were working with tiger sharks that had been feeding on a dead sperm whale carcass and the sperm whale carcass had been bitten down to something the size of maybe four or five, maybe ten hay bales put together. That was all that was left of this great beast. And at one point there was at least seven really big tiger sharks feeding on this piece of sperm whale and it was being slowly devoured into nothing. And evening was coming along the edge of the Great Barrier Reef not far from Cannes and we were snorkeling, and I realized at a point that the sharks were not going to distinguish us from the smell and the oil and the big piece of blubber that was left and we could easily be victims. And these were tiger sharks, some of which were 14 feet long. And that was the time, as the light went lower, that we felt it was better to get out of the water

With sharks we sometimes photograph back to back, Jennifer and I, so we can defend 360 degrees around us. A funny thing happens when you work behind the camera. You feel in some ways a little bit invulnerable, but in other ways what you want to do really is get this picture, to compose, to shoot, to adjust all the f-stops or shutter speeds or do all the things you have to do as a photographer. Your whole being is intensified right down through the viewfinder of the camera. So sharks are coming along and we're hitting the sharks with the strobes and pushing them away with the cameras, but as long as we react to the sharks (for example with silver tips), they wouldn't bother us. They would continue to circle, continue to look.

Jessica: And so when it comes to photographing sharks or other sea creatures, do you try to remain a detached observer or have you ever interacted with any of these animals?

David: The sea is a pretty cold place and most fish what they want to do most of all is not have their picture taken. And the last thing they want to do is look at you, in some cases. There's very few real interactions underwater, but occasionally in this cold sea there is something that's sort of wonderful.

We were diving in a place called Hopkins Island, which was in the entrance to the Spencer Gulf of South Australia. There's a group of Australian sea lions, a small colony that lives there. When you come up to the island, they'll go into the water when you go into the water and there's a small white sand beach and then after that it gives way to a very rich meadow of sea grass. And they come and they lay on the sea grass and roll around and they will nibble our flippers, they'll bite the strobes, they'll come over and look right into your mask. If you put out the palm of your hand, they'll tickle your hand with the front of their noses.

They like your presence. In other words, they understand your presence and they liked us. Of course, when they left you would leave too because great white sharks are constantly circling the island, culling and looking around for a quick meal, so the colony is quite used to that. They would stand up and look around underwater. But you can look into the eyes, one to one, and it was a little bit like diving with a group of quite friendly Golden Retrievers. That being said, if you dive in California then you'll deal with a lot of California sea lions. They tend to buzz you, kind of like psychotic torpedoes.

Jessica: In your biography, you mention that one of your challenges is to redefine photographic boundaries each time you enter the water. Can you explain a little bit about what you meant by that and give us a few examples?

Nudibranch.
(© David Doubilet / daviddoubilet.com)

David: Here's a good example of a photographic boundary. For years, as long as I worked for National Geographic, I would or somebody else would propose a story on nudibranchs. These are basically a sea-going snail without a shell that develops the most incredible colors in the world because of their need to have a method of survival and their method of survival is they feed on very toxic things like ascidians and sponges. And then they advertise the fact that they are toxic. In other words, this toxicity is incorporated into their flesh. In some cases, they advertise this toxicity by being brilliantly colored creatures.

There are so many ways that these creatures have an ability to survive, so many ideas and different strategies that they use, but they're snails. And if you want to do a story on these things, you have to number one understand what they look like and you have to have some kind of intimacy to them. In other words, to be eye to eye to them. Most photographers photograph them, because they live on the bottom, they'll photograph them looking down on them. And it's a little like doing pictures of children and photographing only the tops of their heads. And not only that, they are something that's not quite understandable. So I thought for a long while and said, "Let's build a tiny studio underwater and treat these creatures like fashion models because the colors they create are more robust and incredibly vibrant than any piece of fashion I've ever seen, and that includes Haight-Ashbury in 1968."

So I built a tiny studio, and by tiny I mean it's a ten-inch square studio with a curved back wall like a real studio made out of Plexiglas mounted on a tri-pod. We took it underwater, we took it to the nudibranchs, and with the help of a nudibranch expert move the nudibranchs off the sea floor and into the studio momentarily, which didn't hurt them at all, and photographed them in a studio setting. And I could not only photograph them against a white background, but I could get to their level and look across into their eyes, which are not eyes at all but feather-like linafores.

And that was an approach. Some people said, "Well, you moved nudibranchs. You did all these other things." And I said, "That's a very selfish idea to say that because divers understand what nudibranchs are. Ninety percent of the world does not. These are creatures that are part of this whole tapestry of life that will disappear as the climate changes."

That's one approach. Other approaches are we did a story on artificial reefs. We put cameras on the bow and the bridge of a ship called the Vandenberg, which was sunk off of Key West to produce a reef, so we could photograph a ship actually in the throes of going to the bottom, which turned out to be very exciting. We'd been taking the cameras to other places where we live along the St. Lawrence River right now, among other things. So there's a lot of stories that we always try to add one more step, one more piece of vision, one more piece of technology. Where technology meets dreams, you make photographs.

And in the new digital age, there's a lot of things that we do now that we've never been able to do before. We can begin to stitch together pictures so you can see an entire shipwreck underwater or a reef system underwater. We can shoot in light you could never see before. Jennifer and I dove on a tank, it was an M-60 tank that was dropped into the depths of Mobile Bay for an artificial reef program. We went down 100 feet or so in Mobile Bay, which is never very clear and it was as dark as the inside of a boot. And I vaguely saw the outline of the tank. Jennifer was swimming around a large light trying to look at it. And I turned the camera down and I could hardly see her and began to shoot and made a series of pictures. On the way up I checked the camera's viewfinder and there was an image that was publishable in a place that I could barely see with almost no light.

Humpback Whale, with newborn, in French Polynesia.
(© David Doubilet / daviddoubilet.com)

So we're doing things like that. And I think that the stories we can do on bioluminescence with the new cameras that can shoot in very low light. There's stories that I did on ultraviolet radiation from coral. In other words if you put an ultraviolet light onto some corals, in this case in the Red Sea, they will absorb and reflect a whole different spectrum of light and it's incredibly beautiful situation. I used an HMI light with a heavy UV filter and then we filtered the light out of that to produce a series of pictures with ultraviolet light. So there's always something that I'm trying to look for in terms of how I'm shooting pictures and how Jennifer and I approach a story.

Jessica: Well, and it sounds like that is part of the excitement is trying out technologies in different environments.

David: Yeah. The most exciting thing about photography is to meet a kind of challenge, to look at a situation and say, "How can I illustrate this? How can I make this picture something more than what we see, something more exciting." And maybe see an environment that you see with your naked eyes as we turn our heads that can be basically put into a very small rectangular piece of film or digital captures and put it on the page that incorporates the poetry, the environment, the atmosphere of a place that you're shooting. I think that that's the biggest challenge.

Jessica: Has there ever been an instance where a place or a country wouldn't let you take pictures? Have you come across that?

David: Underwater photographers, for some reason, are not really politically suspect as we go into countries. But, for instance, Cuba became a very important country for us. Jennifer and I and our colleague Peter Benchley did a story on the reefs in 2000. And Peter summed it up best as he said, "I sat on a side of a boat in the southern part of Cuba, rolled over backwards, and rolled into a reef that was from 1950."

In other words, the first reefs that we saw as divers were just full of life. And there's places in Cuba like the Gardens of the Queen, this wonderful archipelago. And all the things that we remembered that a reef looked like when we first started diving, Peter and I there in Cuba, were de facto preserved, preserve basically caused by politics. The question is, when we recognize Cuba how are we and the Cuban people and biologists going to keep this incredible set of reefs and walls and coral extravaganzas and incredibly rich places as pristine? And that's going to be a real challenge. The rest of the Caribbean, for the most part, has been very much changed by overfishing and other things, too. But the southern reefs in Cuba are incredible.

Jessica: So let's switch gears a little bit. Can you talk a little about your partnership with Earthjustice and how you first learned about the organization?

David: I was asked to speak at an Earthjustice seminar in Monterey and that was my first connection with Earthjustice. And I found that this was an organization that basically stood on the forefront of helping humans to at least hold onto what this planet has and what the potentials of this planet are. I can't think of any other group that will do more to do this. It's very simple.

The idea of what is beneath the very surface of the seas is an idea that's only about sixty years old. In all the entire history of humanity, humans had never really begun to go into the sea until about 60 years ago. The view through a face mask and the ability to breathe underwater and swim freely gives you an entire view of the ocean and that's only an idea that's 60 years old as I said before.

We have just begun to look into the ocean and my realization is that we've, as humans, acted in a normal human way that we do. We are conquistadors. As we discover, we destroy. It's a very sad fact, but if you turn this around at least we have a place now that we just found out about that maybe, just may be worth the justice that humans can sometimes bring to a place. We can preserve.

Jessica: That's interesting. Just a couple of final questions. You've been in the field for decades now, taking hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Do you have any tips on how to get started with underwater photography or even photography in general?

David: Well, the first thing about underwater photography is you've got to be comfortable underwater. And people say, "Well I'm going learn how to scuba dive and then take pictures immediately." I think that's a mistake. I think that what you have to do is learn how to dive, which is relatively easy. You do need to have some skills and, of course, the organizations to teach you how to dive are very good these days, but you have to have some time underwater before you take a camera. That's my first advice. Look around. Be very comfortable. Have at least a hundred dives.

And then, when you begin to take a camera, we live now in the digital world where the learning curve of how to become an underwater photographer is very much shortened because you can see exactly what you shoot. In years back, I would do assignments where I wouldn't see a picture that I'd made for three or four months, which is a little bit frightening. But now you see exactly what you shoot. There are terrific underwater point and shoot cameras now and then you can graduate later on to a single lens reflex underwater—a digital single lens reflex, DSLR is what they call them, and then underwater housing. The strobes are good, the camera housings are good and most of all the feedback is beyond belief. You take a picture, you see it instantly.

So, the thing is to be comfortable underwater and then go into the water and look around at the seascapes and then look around at the smaller creatures in the sea. Remember that most of the creatures in the sea are the size of your hand or smaller, and so there's an entire world of macrophotography in the ocean as well as an entire world of seascapes and larger animals. You don't have to start in shark-infested waters immediately.

We're working more and more actually in freshwater, too, which is very exciting. It's an entirely different world.

Jessica: You mentioned your wife Jen, she's an aquatic biologist. Do you feel like it's important for photographers to have at least some basic knowledge about the thing that they're photographing? Does that make a big difference?

Weedy sea dragon, in the kelp forest of Tasmania, Australia. (© David Doubilet / daviddoubilet.com)

David: Of course it's great to have knowledge about what you're photographing. In fact, that's basically my entire life is to know what we're shooting. And then of course there's a lot of research and a lot of work and reading as much as you can, so when you see something, you sort of know what it is. You can identify the species. And of course the most important factor in photography is the guide. Your guide, the person who lives there, the person who knows what the world is that you're photographing is all about. You trust their judgment and then modify it with some of your experience and you come up with something that's new. And then work with others as a team. So Jennifer and I, firstly we work with some marvelous people across the world. Some are photographers, some are simply guides, some people just know the territory. And those kind of relationships are the most important.

Jessica: And do you find that just as much as working with them, you're also learning quite a bit of knowledge from them, I imagine?

David: The thing about a Geographic assignment is that it's like a graduate course in whatever we're doing. And the only difference is you translate that into visual material. You're always learning and you never really get it. There's no such thing as a finished assignment. There's always one more thing you have to get, one more thing you have to do. It's a very Sisyphean life because you basically roll an enormous stone up an enormous hill and when you get to the top if you're successful your best reward is another enormous stone and another enormous hill.

Jessica: And do you feel like there are certain challenges that come with underwater photographer versus photography on land?

David: It's a completely different world thinking about just in terms of lighting. On land, if you light something up in a studio or use a flash in the air, you don't have to ever worry about the return path of the light. Underwater, the return path of a light is absorbed, so the light going out is not the light reflected. You have deal with the fact that the water wants to destroy every piece of camera equipment you've ever owned by getting inside housings, inside the tiny O-rings that are attached to the controls. You have to have strobes that produce a ninety degree path of light and recycle very quickly.

And, most of all, you have very limited time. For instance, if you're shooting something in, say, a 150 feet of water, deep water, you will have for an entire day about 15 minutes. The price for that 15 minutes down there will be hours of decompression. Imagine doing a story where you're only allowed to shoot a subject for 15 minutes. It's like sports photography, only while holding your breath!

Jessica: Okay. One last question. You mentioned yesterday that you're about to go back on assignment. Where are you headed?

David: Well we're headed right now probably southward to do some work with some endangered species of fish in the Caribbean and then northward to do some work along the St. Lawrence River.

Jessica: Okay, well that's all the questions that I have for today. Thank you again for your time. And if our listeners would like to learn more about David's Doubilet's underwater photography collection, please visit DavidDoubilet.com or earthjustice.org.

View a slideshow of David Doubilet's photography: Under The Sea, With David Doubilet