A Thousand Kisses Deep
In 2005, Erick saw a long time friend in a dive shop in Western Australia where he used to work and he spoke about an island in the pacific where whales would go and you could see 60-100m visibility underwater. This is what sparked the idea to take photographs of these mammals but the idea was if we had to capture big whales and then it had to be on big format.
This project is the test before going to this island - and although we didn't eventually see any whales on the second trip - the test itself resulted in amazing pictures!
These were taken with PN55, which is a polaroid film where you get a positive and negative at the same time! A wonderful film with really good grain.
Without going to too much details, It took us a year to figure out how to do this. For this project, we were in Tahiti for 3 weeks, shooting eight hours a day and getting about 1 photo an hour! The Camera housing itself was so big we had 15kg around it to make it sink.
Very hard work but yet wonderful joy each time Erick came back to the surface and I was looking at the results.
These images won numerous award around the world.
Scroll through to see the results. ->
Articles worth reading:
National Geographic 2016
Peta Pixel 2016