Is there such a think as too close? “Not really,” says Frink, who’s famous for going nose to nose (and nose to fin) with man-eating great white sharks, killer whales, and dangerous crocodiles as well as more docile subjects like dolphins. “You’ll have a hard time getting anything worthwhile if you are more than five feet away.” And because light sources, such as a strobe, are only effective for a few feet underwater, you need to get up close and personal-shrinking the water column-to capture a sharp image,” he explains. Red fades first, followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and then violet.

Light is selectively absorbed as a function of depth. “Because water is about 800 times denser than air, it filters out colors the deeper or farther from the light source you are. After taking another drink, he launches into a mini-discourse that sounds like it was taken from a combination of Physics 101 and Introduction to Photography. “That’s easy,” says the 69-year-old Frink, whom many publications have called the world’s most widely published underwater photographer. Holding onto success despite changing tidesĪs he sips a cup of coffee in a Starbucks near his Key Largo studio in the Florida Keys, veteran underwater photographer Stephen Frink doesn’t pause for a second when asked to name the most important requirement for a great underwater photograph.

Stephen frink photos