In my early days of freelance writing, my work consisted primarily of outdoor gear reviews—boots, backpacks, skis, rain jackets, that sort of thing. My background working at REI and Midwest Mountaineering, as well as my predilection for messing around outside made me well suited for this kind of work. Gishani and I used to do a lot of backpacking and paddling trips in all weather, so I had ample opportunity to put gear through its paces. Gear Patrol, my primary writing outlet, preferred original photography to accompany articles, instead of stock or press photos. It not only made the stories more visually unique, it also added an authenticity to the reviews themselves, since the author was shown actually using the products instead of simply regurgitating press releases. This necessitated that I, or rather we, start shooting photos of all the gear that came my way. So we bought a decent camera, a crop sensor Nikon DSLR I think it was, and Gishani started following me around taking photos.
I remember many shoots done in less than ideal conditions. One winter, I got a couple pairs of cross country skis to try out, and a deadline for my story, but we had very little snow, so I remember going to a local golf course and skiing back and forth across the same patch of crusty snow in the shade of some trees to get the photos of the skis in action. Or that time Gishani had to pass the camera up a slippery waterfall to me, with its strap dangling from a long stick we found, before she could scale the rocks behind me. The stick broke, the camera fell into the pool below the waterfall and, well, we bought another camera. We dabbled in video for a bike review that had me riding up and down the same hill over and over, and Gishani filming me out the rolling car window while driving next to me (not recommended, I might add). Only through some expert editing did the video turn out alright.
After a few years, more experience, and some camera equipment upgrades, we decided it was time to take things up a notch. So we enrolled in a two-day course entitled, “Introduction to Mountain Sports Photography,” given by Dan and Janine Patitucci, a rock star duo living in Interlachen, Switzerland, who had shot catalogs for Cervélo bikes, Patagonia, and Outdoor Research, in addition to countless magazine covers. We flew to Switzerland and met Dan and Janine at a ski station above Grindelwald, where they proceeded to coach us and a few other students on the tricks of their trade. While we really had no ambition to enter the competitive and specialized field of “mountain sports” photography—alpine skiing, trail running, rock climbing—the principles they taught regarding location choice, clothing selection (bright is best), composition, and art direction (“Look athletic!”), as well as post production editing and file management crossed genres and was as applicable to the work we were doing with outdoor gear reviews as it was to mountaineering. It also happened to apply well to underwater photography, which was a field we were just getting into.
It takes a special kind of masochist to choose underwater watch photography as a specialty. Shooting a tiny, shiny object through a medium that sucks up light and color and actively conspires to flood and ruin electronics, while competing with depth, current, limited time, topside weather, and wildlife is about as difficult as you can get when it comes to product photography. Not to mention traveling with not only heavy dive gear but also equally heavy and fragile camera equipment. But I like to think that the work chose us more than we chose it. Since I’d gotten into diving and my writing had become more specialized into the watch space, it was a natural progression to start reviewing dive watches, well, diving. But, as with the backpacks, bikes, and boots, we needed photos to accompany the stories.
We started out using a tiny, slow, low-resolution Olympus camera with no strobes inside a plastic underwater case. The shutter lag was so pronounced and the low light capabilities so poor that we were lucky to get one or two decent (as in “clear and in focus”) photos for an entire trip. Naturally we upgraded the gear, with eye watering expense, and honed technique. We progressed from the Olympus to a series of Nikons in ever more expensive housings from Ikelite and then Nauticam, and added strobes to fill in the light and color that the water depth sucked up. Now, when I say “we,” of course I really mean Gishani, and occasionally my old cold water diving chum, Chris Winters, behind the lens. I’m just “the talent,” as they call it in the business, the prima donna underwater wrist model who shows up looking pretty and posing on command. But I swear there’s an art to that as well.
So much of the dive watch photography I’d seen when we first started out consisted of closeup wrist shots taken by the diver himself. This led to no real context in the photo. It might as well have been taken in an office with maybe an aquarium blurry in the background. Or the photos felt like vacation snaps, with a diver grinning at the camera, holding up his wrist in an unnatural way. With Gishani or Chris shooting me, I could devise a number of “poses” that would demonstrate the watch in action, such as adjusting a mask, reaching for a knife, adjusting the timing bezel, or tightening a strap. Being a student of old dive magazines and underwater action films, I enjoyed this art direction element of projects, and after a while, we would put together shot lists, with sketches or sample images to show the types of poses we would try, both underwater and topside. We got to the point where we knew where the sun would hit a shipwreck so plan the dive for a certain time of day, how I would be positioned in order to maximize the light on the watch, and so on. I even started wearing a black neoprene hood, not for warmth, but to cover my balding pate, which became a distracting, reflective source of high contrast in photos. A hood also added an anonymity to the images, focusing more on the watch, which was the real star of the show.
A big inspiration for me early on was seeing the catalog photos for the launch of IWC’s then new Aquatimer lineup back in 2010. IWC had commissioned the renowned photographer, Michael Muller, to create the images during a multi-week liveaboard expedition to the Galapagos Islands. IWC underwrote the expedition, provided the watches, and out of it came a couple of excellent documentary films and some amazing images. What struck me was the realism of the photos. Many were simply photojournalistic, with the watches as incidental furniture, while some were obviously staged. But there was a gritty, in your face realism to the images, many of them almost blown out, looking up into the sun, some slightly blurry, the watch partially obscured. It reflected the toughness of the diving in the Galapagos (we were there a few years later) and, by extension, the watches themselves. I wanted to adopt some of those techniques and general vibe in our own work.
Our labors bore fruit in the following years, and I continued to win editorial gigs for publications reviewing watches, as well as some commercial shoots for Bell & Ross (Florida Keys), Bremont (Bahamas), IWC (California), Tudor (Cayman Islands), and Eterna (Bonaire). We also worked on the launch of Hodinkee’s limited edition Blancpain Bathyscaphe, a shoot in California where I was not wearing the watch but acting as a sort of underwater art director and camera technician while Gishani handled the actual shooting. It was an incredibly ambitious project and another huge leap of education for us, seeing how a multifaceted project comes together. Along the way, we had a lot of challenging shoots that made a lack of snow look like a picnic: bad weather, flooded watches, a lost diver, and malfunctioning gear, often times in far flung places on the planet.
Nowadays, we dive more for fun than for work, and are trying to diversify our vacations a bit more. It got to the point where every trip became a work project and the diving not as fun because it was all about getting the shot instead of enjoying what attracted us to diving in the first place. Also, the industry landscape is different than it was ten years ago. I’m seeing more underwater watch photography than I used to, in both watch brand marketing, and the editorial space and it doesn’t feel as niche or unique as it once did. Also, I’m not sure how much more I can say, editorially, about dive watches than I have already. After all, they’re pretty simple creatures. Commercial work can still be fun, but that comes with a necessary level of hustle, sales and pitching that I simply don’t have the time for due to other priorities. But wow, what a ride it’s been, and don’t think we’re completely done yet. We’ll keep shooting those tiny, shiny objects deep underwater because it’s endlessly challenging and who doesn’t enjoy a good challenge?
None have done it better I might say. It takes a unique talent and creativity to both do the dive and do the writing. Doesn't hurt to have a talented spouse at your side! Dad
Hello Jason, please don't stop doing underwater watch reviews. Although there are more people trying it nowadays they simply aren't anything like yours, I find myself reading your older more obscure watch/diving stories even when I'm not even interested in the timepiece! I understand not everything you write can be a diving story/review but I absolutely savor them when they come up, thanks.