Why I Like the Small Stuff

For the first 2,500 dives or so, I mostly shot wide angle.

Big scenes. Big reef. Big water. Big hope.

Most of my work then was close-focus wide-angle, getting very close to something in the foreground while still showing the reef, divers, or open water behind it. It is a beautiful way to photograph underwater. When it works, it really works. You can make an image that feels like you are inside the scene.

The problem is that I spent a lot of dives waiting for something epic to swim in front of me.

A shark. A turtle. A ray. A school of fish. Something large enough, graceful enough, and cooperative enough to make the whole frame come alive. I would start the dive thinking, maybe today is the day something amazing decides to pass right through the picture.

Often, it did not.

That was not the ocean coming up short. That was me looking too narrowly.

Looking for the Big Thing

At the time, I was working at a small dive resort in Honduras. I was a divemaster, and a lot of my job was not artistic. It was practical.

Get the guests off the boat. Lead the dive. Keep track of everyone. Move the group around the site in some version of a square, rectangle, loop, or whatever shape would get everyone back safely to the mooring line while making it look like I knew exactly where I was the entire time.

That last part matters.

A divemaster should never look lost, even when the reef is doing its best to make every coral head look like the last one.

I was also taking pictures of the guests. That meant I was not really free to wander off and explore. I could not spend twenty minutes watching one little hole in the reef just because something interesting might happen there. I had people to watch, air to monitor, currents to think about, and a boat to get back to.

The ocean may be beautiful, but eight divers with rental gear can turn any dive into a moving math problem.

So most of the time, I photographed what was available while doing the job. Wide angle made sense. It showed the reef, the divers, the scene, and the sense of place. It was the right tool for what I was being asked to do.

But it also trained me to keep looking outward.

I was always waiting for the big thing.

What I Was Missing

The funny part is that while I was waiting for something impressive to appear, I was probably swimming past impressive things the entire time.

Small things.

Quiet things.

The little faces tucked into holes. The textures on coral and sponge. The patterns on fish. The eye of a blenny watching me from a place I had barely noticed. The small creatures that do not announce themselves, because they are not trying to impress anyone.

They were there.

I just had not learned to look for them yet.

That is one of the strange lessons of underwater photography. At first, you think the ocean has to deliver something big. Later, you realize the ocean is already loaded with small miracles, but you have to slow down enough to see them.

I was not there yet.

I was still waiting for the whale shark to enter stage left.

The Job Changed

Eventually my duties changed.

I went from divemaster and instructor to liveaboard photo pro. Then, pretty quickly, to liveaboard captain. That changed everything.

Now I had divemasters, instructors, and crew to lead dives, watch guests, solve problems, and keep the circus moving in the right direction. I was still responsible, of course. More responsible, actually. But I was no longer trying to lead a group underwater while also making photographs.

That gave me room to look.

Really look.

The Job Was Still the Job

There was another layer to it.

As the photo pro, part of my job was to find the interesting little things for other photographers. The shrimp in the sponge. The jawfish in the sand. The blenny tucked into a hole. The small subject that most divers would swim right past.

And when I found it, my job was often to let someone else get the shot.

That is easy to forget from the outside. People had paid a lot of money to be there. If there were four other photographers on the dive, they were not there to watch me make pictures. They were there to make their own.

So I learned to find the subject, show it clearly, back away, and let them work.

That was part of the job.

It was not always satisfying in the moment, because I wanted the shot too. Of course I did. I had a camera in my hands and something beautiful in front of me. But it taught me something important. It taught me to observe first. It taught me to recognize behavior and habitat. It taught me to see the picture before I could take it.

Sometimes the best training is being forced to wait your turn.

Annoying, but effective.

The 60mm Changed Everything

Somewhere in that period, I discovered my favorite lens: a 60mm macro behind a flat port.

And I was free.

Not free in the fantasy sense. I still had a job, responsibilities, guests, divers, schedules, currents, boats, and all the other moving parts that come with working on the water.

But photographically, something opened up.

The 60mm gave me a different way to see the reef.

A macro lens changes your relationship with the underwater world. Wide angle asks you to look at the whole scene. Macro asks you to pay attention to what is right in front of you.

It narrows the world in the best possible way.

With the 60mm, I did not need something huge to swim by. I did not need a dramatic background or a perfect blue-water moment. I could find a subject the size of my thumb and spend the dive working with shape, color, expression, texture, and patience.

Fish portraits became an obsession.

There is something about looking closely at a fish that changes how you see it. From a distance, it may just be another reef fish. Up close, there is personality. There is attitude. There is pattern. There is an eye looking back at you that makes it very clear you are not the only one doing the observing.

That part matters to me.

The best fish portraits are not just records of a species. They feel like encounters.

The Small Stuff Was Never Small

Once I started looking this way, the reef opened up.

Textures became landscapes.
Patterns became design.
Scales became armor.
Eyes became stories.
Tiny subjects became entire worlds.

There are fractals everywhere underwater. Repeating shapes. Branching patterns. Spirals. Spots. Stripes. Color transitions so subtle they disappear unless you are close enough and patient enough to notice.

A small fish can carry more color than an entire wide-angle scene. A patch of sponge can look like architecture. The face of a goby can feel more expressive than a dolphin show, and it does not require anyone to clap.

That is the beauty of the small stuff.

It does not chase attention.

You have to earn it.

Hidden in the Blue

People often think of the underwater world as blue, and that is fair. From the surface, from a distance, and in available light, blue takes over everything.

But the closer you look, the more that blue begins to break apart.

There are reds, oranges, yellows, purples, greens, metallic flashes, tiny textures, and colors that seem almost impossible for something living in shadow. Much of it is hidden by water, distance, and speed. You can swim over it for years and never really see it.

The small stuff taught me that underwater photography is not always about finding more.

Sometimes it is about seeing less, better.

One fish.
One eye.
One texture.
One quiet moment on the reef.

That can be enough.

No Excuse Not to Look

When I taught underwater photography, I would often tell students they should come back from a dive with at least fifty photographs.

Not fifty masterpieces. Let’s not get carried away.

Fifty attempts. Fifty decisions. Fifty frames that showed they were looking.

There is never really an excuse not to find some kind of interesting frame underwater. It may not be the frame you expected. It may not be the turtle, the ray, the shark, or the big dramatic reef scene you had in your head before the dive.

But something is there.

A pattern.
A face.
A color.
A shadow.
A small behavior.
A texture you almost missed.

That was the lesson I wanted students to learn, and it was the same lesson I had to learn myself. The reef is rarely empty. Most of the time, we are just moving too fast, expecting too much, or looking in the wrong direction.

Underwater photography gets better when you stop waiting for the ocean to perform and start paying attention to what it is already showing you.

Why It Stayed With Me

I still love a strong wide-angle image. There is nothing like a beautiful reef scene, clear water, a big animal, or a diver placed perfectly in the frame. Wide angle shows the scale of the world below.

But macro taught me intimacy.

It taught me to stop rushing. It taught me that the reef is not empty just because nothing large swam by. It taught me that disappointment usually says more about my expectations than about the dive.

That one stung a little, but it was true.

The ocean was not failing to provide something interesting.

I was failing to look carefully enough.

Learning to Look Smaller

The longer I photographed underwater, the more I understood that small subjects were not a backup plan. They were not what you shot when the big animals did not show up.

They were the story.

The overlooked fish. The tiny creatures. The textures. The patterns. The faces hiding in plain sight. The colors tucked into the reef where most people swim right past them.

That is where a lot of my favorite work came from.

Not from chasing the biggest thing in the ocean (except maybe sharks, I do love to chase sharks!) , but from finally learning to see what had been there all along.

That is why I like the small stuff.

Because it made me a better photographer.

And probably a better diver.

Beauty Below Notes

Beauty Below is built from years spent underwater, but these stories are not here to make the ocean seem more interesting than it already is. It does not need the help. They are here to share what was seen, what was learned, and why it still matters to look carefully.