"Jim Clark who helped found OPS commissioned the best underwater camera in the world. It’s a 65 megapixel view camera with a Rodenstock lens and the best dome port in the world. You see far more detail in our prints than you can see when you are actually on a reef. David Doubilet, who I regard as the best underwater photographer in the world came with us on an expedition and called it, “the holy grail of underwater photography.” We’ve been traveling to some of the best preserved reefs in the world, mainly to Raja Ampat, (Four Kings) in the Irian Jaya part of Indonesia, Andaman Islands of India, Polynesia and the Caribbean. Jim is a technical genius and one of the most tenacious advocates of perfection that I’ve known. He has managed to resolve some of the most nagging problems of underwater photography by systematically working through the problems of edge sharpness and color aberrations. Of course simply having the best camera in the world doesn’t make you a good photographer any more than having a great typewriter makes you a Hemingway. I’ve spent over 35 years as a professional photographer, working much of that time for National Geographic Magazine. When they hired me out of college, I was the first new photographer they hired in more than a decade. Shooting underwater is perhaps one of the most challenging endeavors in photography. In addition to the all the problems associated with dry land, you have strong currents (the best shots occur during extreme tidal shifts), water clarity, poor visibility, all red light spectrum falls off after submerging a few feet, animal behavior, limited air supply and working with electronics in a salt water, the most unfriendly environments in the world. Added to this, we dive with rebreathers, which allow you to stay underwater for about 3 hours at a time, provide a bubble free working environment and their silent operation allows us to move with stealth through the marine environment. The problem is that our rebreathers are dangerous, they kill about 1% of the people that use them. It’s expensive working underwater in remote locations. We typically have to travel with about a ton or more of gear and travel with a large team to support lighting and the rebreathers which require a lot of maintenance.

We’re selling the fine art prints with the aim of using the proceeds to fund ongoing OPS projects."

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