If, right this moment, I could be anywhere in the world, I might choose to be in a national park in an exotic country. But I’m at home, in front of my computer. And I just got back from taking a walk in my neighborhood.
My route is largely the same every time I do it, and I try to walk it at least every other day. Someone I regularly see on these walks asked me once why I don’t choose a different path. “I would be so bored,” she said.
Photography is one of the tools I use to satisfy my curiosity about the natural world. But while 99 percent of my photos are taken from land, more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water. Life is short and nobody can see everything, of course, but my choice of subjects had significantly limited my worldview.
It’s a discrepancy that I’ve been trying to resolve off and on over the past decade or so. Just over a year ago, I made my greatest effort yet to explore the world beneath the waves as I explored the lagoons surrounding three of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.
