Q&A: Underwater Photographer Ethan Daniels

Patch recently caught up with biologist and underwater photojounalist Ethan Daniels, whose 2010 book Under Cape Cod Waters offers a stunning glimpse at the often overlooked creatures who dwell in the waters all around us. Daniels will appear tonight, August 1, at 7:30pm at the for a talk and book signing. 

Q: These photographs are incredible. Are you a full-time photographer? What’s your background?

A: I actually went to school to become a biologist, and I even went to graduate school for biology. So that education really played a large role in what I now photograph—specifically in the water—because I really focused all of my education on the marine side of biology. After graduate school, I worked as a dive guide out in Micronesia for many years, and then worked as a biologist for the government of Palau, and during that time I started getting a bit serious about underwater photography and started publishing a little bit. And then I moved back to the United States in 2004. When you come back to the U.S. after being gone almost ten years with a background as a coral reef ecologist and biologist, there’s really not much work for you. At that point, I decided to put much more energy into the photography side of my interests, and tried to make a go of that. These days, I spend about half my time shooting and writing for magazines. The other half I guide diving and snorkeling trips all over the world. 

Q: You talk in the book about having spent summers on the Cape when you were a kid, and that growing up there left a big impression on you. Had the idea for a book been germinating in you for a long time? 

A: One of the greatest inspirations for [my book] was Bill Sargent, who wrote Shallow Waters, which was published in 1980, so over 30 years ago now. Shallow Waters is fantastic; it’s a wonderful book about Pleasant Bay, looking at that ecosystem and that habitat over the course of an entire year. That book had always been on our coffee table when I was growing up, and I continue to go back to it. It’s just one of those books that draws me back again and again. Also, no one had really done any sort of digital underwater photography work from this area. To me there was this gaping hole, and wow, nobody knows, or people have seen some of the species—they see starfish, they see fish, they see seals—but they don’t really see them in their natural habitat. The only way you can do that, of course, is by diving or snorkeling and through the use of underwater photography. So that was kind of the hope in terms of the creation of the book, was to provide a little bit of insight—inspiration, I suppose—to natives as well as people who visit here and really never get a chance to see the native flora and fauna in the habitat they actually exist in.

Q: What is it like to take photographs underwater, as opposed to on land?

A: Underwater photography is certainly a challenge. It’s much more difficult than terrestrial photography, because you’re in a medium that you’re really not used to. I spent thousands and thousands of hours over the course of my life in the water, and I still spend hundreds of hours every year in the water, so I mean, I’m used to working in the medium, but when you take a camera in there, it’s a totally different ball game. The light is always changing and you have to make sure your camera’s not getting wet, so you’ve got this big, bulky metal housing surrounding your camera. You also need to use these external strobes to light up your foreground. The combination of using these strobes and then combining natural light to light up the background can be quite difficult if you’re not used to it. I will say this: I shoot all over the world, I spent a lot of time out in Indonesia and Micronesia, and sometimes I go to the Caribbean, and the Cape has certainly been the most challenging underwater photography that I’ve ever done. Mainly because the visibility here is always fairly poor. And it’s always been that way, just because there’s a lot of nutrients up in the Northern Atlantic, and temperate habitats. So it was really a challenge to create a lot of the images. 

Q: Along those same lines, what is it like to photograph living creatures? They don’t exactly sit still to get their picture taken. 

A: Part of getting good shots on a regular basis is knowing the habits of many of the organisms you’re trying to shoot. And that’s where my background in biology has really helped, and of course, spending a lot of time in the water, observing creatures all over the world. I mean, they all really act the same. You really have to be fluid, and you have to allow animals to get used to you, in order for you to approach them, especially with a big camera. Most wildlife is very wary, for good reason. And sometimes you may only get a couple of shots, and that’s your opportunity for your whole entire lifetime for that animal.

Q: Were any of the images shot near or around Falmouth? 

One of the wrecks that I shot was not too far from Falmouth. The Port Hunter was a ship that went down, a freighter, which went down around World War I, and actually it was carrying a lot of supplies down for Europe. But you know, what’s interesting is that throughout the Cape—and this goes from P-town all the way to Falmouth, really—most of the species that are within the book exist throughout the entire Cape. For the most part you’ve got species which can handle a lot of temperature swings and very cold weather in the winter and such. And this is one of the things about the Cape; things are always changing here. You always have the immigration of new species, and the extinction of some other species. It’s just a natural process. If you take man out of the situation—if we weren’t here at all—the same thing would be happening. I love to see natural change, just because it’s kind of reaffirming to me of the way the planet works. Each year I come out [to the Cape], it’s a little bit different, which makes things quite interesting. 

Q: I’m sure you know that the Cape has some pretty significant water quality problems. Do you consider this book a wake-up call for all of us to stop polluting our waters? 

A: In a way it is meant as something that hopefully will enlighten people and make them a bit aware of their land use decisions, because whatever you decide to do on land, of course, affects what happens in the water, especially the near shore waters. Having said that, I’m also a very cautious optimist over geological time. What I like to see is good news. Just the sign that Great Whites are back is a really good signal that at least the food web is able to support these large animals. Now, I do see other smaller cycles going on, like there aren’t as many blue crabs now, in my area, as there were when I was young. It’s really hard to say that man has had a direct influence on that. That may have to do with the natural larval cycle that blue crabs, that the larva aren’t reaching this area due to current temperatures or current movements. And that may switch in another decade. We just don’t know. That’s one of the things that I’d love for people to keep in mind, is that we know so little. We like to think we know a lot, and we can name every species, but we know so little about them—we don’t really know much about their life histories, and the interconnectedness from one ecosystem and one habitat to another.