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David Doubilet 2008, Pioneer of Undersea Photography

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David Doubilet 2008 Audio

Pioneer of Undersea Photography
Introduction

David Doubilet first fell in love with the undersea world as a child, snorkeling off the north coast of New Jersey. At age 12, he wrapped a Brownie camera in a plastic bag to take his first underwater pictures. He trained rigorously to excel as both diver and photographer; within a year of graduating from Boston University in 1970, he shot his first story for National Geographic, a relationship that continues to this day. In addition to contributing photographs and columns to a host of travel, nature and diving magazines, he has published half a dozen books of his astonishing images. Both inspired artist and fearless explorer, his expeditions have taken him around the world -- from the Caribbean to the South Pacific, from the Indian Ocean to the Galapagos Islands -- capturing the amazing creatures, brilliant scenery and otherworldly light of the ocean's depths. In reefs and caverns of fluorescent coral, he has recorded the most intense colors on the planet, as seen in his books, Water Light Time and The Kingdom of Coral: Australia's Great Barrier Reef. He has plumbed the mysterious depths of Loch Ness, Scotland and inspected the submerged remains of the USS Arizona at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, pioneering the use of the split-lens camera to take pictures at the water line, keeping objects above and below the waves in focus simultaneously. Recent assignments have taken him to the southern coast of Australia to photograph the great white shark, a fearsome predator, now itself endangered by the unregulated predation of man. His book, The Red Sea, documents the vistas of his "favorite underwater studio." Never far from the water, he maintains two homes in contrasting aquatic environments, one on the St. Lawrence River in Clayton, New York, and another on the sea at DeKelders, South Africa. When he is not on location, David Doubilet is a popular spokesman for the National Geographic Society, sharing his brilliant images to advocate for the conservation of what he has called "the most beautiful, most mysterious part of our planet."



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