Why I Don't Use Strobe

There is no strobe in my kit. There never has been.

Strobe light is imposing. It arrives from outside and changes what's there. The reds come back. The water turns transparent. The scene becomes legible — and becomes something it never was.

At depth, on Victoria's southern coast, the light is dim and green and directional. That is the truth of the place. It is what a seal sees. It is what the kelp grows in. To photograph it any other way is to describe somewhere else.

Available light is what the ocean holds at that depth, at that moment, in that season. Working with it means accepting what it gives. Winter gives less. Some days it gives nothing, and I come up with nothing, and that is part of it too.

The images are mostly dark. That darkness is not a problem the equipment failed to solve. It is the subject. Movement slows there. Colour narrows to what the water allows. What appears, appears briefly, and the image either holds it or it doesn't.

A weedy sea dragon motionless in kelp does not look like a studio subject. It looks like something seen. Barely. Once.

This is the choice underneath every image I make: the photographs show what was actually there. Nothing more arrived with me.