From the Winter 1993 issue of the Operating Cameraman

When I look back over the last twenty-five years of my career I would have to say that I am a generalist. That is, I have tried to sample every aspect that cinematography has to offer. Lighting, from table top to massive sets, special effects, overseas work, aerials, high speed cars, marine and underwater are just some areas that I have worked in. However, it is the underwater area that has provided me with some of the most interesting challenges of all. Let me tell you about three film experiences that are all very, very different.

Raise the Titanic

The noted cinematographer, Matt Leonetti, was shooting Raise the Titanic and looking for a second unit cameraman who could handle a lot of model work, much of it underwater. He knew that diving was an avocation of mine, and also knew that I had a pretty solid lighting background. The picture had been in and out of production for about three years at this point. Stanley Kramer had done over a year of pre-production, including some second unit photography, when he and Lew Grade, the producer, parted ways over some artistic differences. The picture went into hiatus for over a year, and eventually director Jerry Jameson was hired to take over the project. By this time, a massive, multi-million dollar "deep-tank" had been constructed on the island of Malta, and they were on their third special effects crew. The first had constructed the model of the Titanic and some other vessels, including a replica of a 600' Navy salvage ship, a tugboat, and some cut-outs of other ships that could be used in long shots. The second crew had gone to Malta, gotten all of the hardware out of storage and proceeded to get things up and running. However, they could not do much more than shoot some tests, as the deep-tank was not yet operational. Eventually, for reasons unknown to myself, they were let go, and the search was on for another team to make it all work.

The tank was still giving them problems. It was a huge basin scooped out of the side of a hill next to the Mediterranean, lined with asphalt and fitted with a false bottom to simulate the bottom of the sea. Holding over ten million gallons of seawater, it was a hundred feet in diameter at the bottom and about three hundred feet in diameter at the surface. At its deepest, it was forty feet, a depth where we could work indefinitely without having to worry about decompression. When they first filled it up, a process that took two days, there was concern that it might burst and send all of that water back into the Med, along with whoever might be in it. A daunting prospect, to say the least. It was quickly drained, and plans were made to strengthen the dam that formed half of its structure. Six months later, the work was completed and we were on a plane bound for Malta.

There is another tank at this facility that has existed for many years, made for the surface photography of models. About four feet deep, and measuring perhaps two hundred by three hundred feet, it was the scene of many a miniature sea battle. At the back of the tank was a spillway that provided a clean horizon line against the sky. We had about a month of work to do here before we were to go into the deep tank.

John Richardson headed up the new effects crew, and he had a big job ahead of him. The model of the Titanic was constructed on a 1/16 scale, but even at that reduced scale the model was 55' long, and weighed over 8 tons! Heavily constructed of fiberglass, with a deck made of steel, it would not float on its own bottom. Instead, there were massive flotation tanks inside the hull that could be filled with air to adjust the model's buoyancy.

The first couple of weeks were rather disappointing. The water was cold, really cold. We started in January, and the water temperature was 52 degrees. Standing around waist deep, with the wind machines and ocean breezes on you, was a real test of one's stamina. At every opportunity, we would run to the showers to pour hot water down our suits, but the effect didn't last long, and soon we were right back into it, dozens of times a day. work we would go back to our apartments which were built as summer rentals and had little, if any, heat. After a while the cold started to take its toll. Perhaps half of the divers came down with influenza at one time, and work almost came to a complete halt. The production company, thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, finally realized that something had to be done, and they got us the dry suits that we had been requesting. This made an enormous difference.

The model was an unwieldy beast. It had been built to accomplish three tasks, and was not really great at any one of them. First, it had to be towed across the shallow tank on the surface. Secondly, it was to be a backdrop for all of the underwater salvage operations, and, finally, it had to break the surface as it was brought up from the depths. Towing was the first problem. It was kind of funny, if it wasn't so tragic, for on its maiden voyage, it slowly rolled over to port and lay on its side, half submerged. The steel deck made it top-heavy, so plans were made to lift it out of the tank for modifications. However, the crane that we had hired proved to be unequal to the task. Just as the keel cleared the water, the crane tipped over and went into the tank, with the model.

Eventually the effects departments worked out their problems and we started to get some good footage. We were shooting this picture in an anamorphic format, using Technovision lenses. All of the surface photography was done at 125 frames per second, fairly standard in this type of work. The cameras were Mitchell Mark II's, housed in watertight boxes with windows fitted for the lenses. The boxes were fitted with flotation pontoons that were adjustable, allowing for the lenses to be within a few inches of the surface. This meant that the viewfinder was also a few inches above the surface, so the waterline came about to your nose.

Finally we were headed for the deep-tank. The engineering department was satisfied that the dam was not going to burst, and a larger crane was engaged to transfer the model. First, the tank was filled and the model was floated out into the middle. Then it was drained, as the model was guided to her place of rest on the fiberglass and steel sea bottom. Then the tank was filled again.

At the time (1980) there were no underwater housing/camera combinations that would fulfill our needs. We had to be able to shoot slow-motion, but the Arri III was a year or more away. I decided that the Mitchell was just too big, so that left the Arri IIC. The high speed movement would give us 80 frames, and we hoped that this would be enough to give us the illusion of size at 1/16 scale. I wanted to put the package into a tubular housing for eases of construction and balance considerations. A backloading displacement type magazine was found in Germany that would provide the low profile that we needed. From Technovision we got a compact motor base that put the motor parallel and close to the camera body. Since the standard Arri motor was rather a crude affair, requiring a huge rheostat, we decided to buy an industrial motor and build our own electronic control for it. We also built an electronic footage counter and put frame rate and footage on the back of the housing in large LED's. The viewfinder was the next problem. An optical viewing tube would be unworkable for two reasons. First of all, the viewing tube would have to be so long in order to take the image to the back of the housing, it would be very dim. Secondly, it would be impossible to keep your mask up to the back of the housing and do the delicate moves required for miniature work. A video monitor seemed to be the only answer. To my knowledge this had never been tried before, but I couldn't think of any reason that it would not work. We put a 5 inch monitor in its own housing and attached it to the main housing. The system needed no beam splitter because we were dispensing with the optical tube, so the video camera got all of the light. De-anamorphozing was done electronically on the monitor, and we had external controls for contrast and brightness. The widest lens that we could get at the time from Technovision was a 40mm, and it looked through a dome port made from a compass housing. The whole package slid into a tube about 12" in diameter, 30" long.

Work commenced in the deep-tank. The water still hovered around the 52 degree mark, but now we were fully immersed in it. Since the real Titanic lays at a depth of over 5000', it is in perpetual night. Since we did not have the tank tarped in yet (a massive job in itself), that meant that we were working nights. The model submarines were now operating for the first time in salt water, and they were having their problems. I think that the first night we went down and came back up at least twenty times. It was cold, really cold.

Exposures proved to be a big problem. We wanted a dark look, but every take got progressively darker until we had not much more than black leader punctuated by the lights on the hulls of the subs. I had shot some tests back in the states, and for these I used a Spectra in its own little underwater housing. This yielded some pretty good results initially, but in the real world we had a host of divers on the set--lighting, grip, camera and effects were all represented. At the end of each take, every diver would, in the course of moving around to do what he had to do, stir up just a little bit of silt. After two or three takes the water would not only be a lot cloudier, but it would act like a filter, reducing the amount of light that would reach the camera. The result was a lot of very dark footage. I agonized over this for some time, and came very close to getting fired until I figured out just what was happening. The solution was simple. I put a spot meter in a housing and made all measurements for the camera position. End of problem. As the silt would start to build up, the meter would sense it and I could adjust the exposure. Actually, that was not quite accurate, for the rather weak lights on the subs meant that I had to shoot wide open - f/2.8 and there was nowhere left to go. If the set got too silty, we would quit and go to another part of this vast tank and do something else.

The size of the tank caused some other problems. One night, early in the game, I called the surface and asked for a reloaded camera. A diver was sent down with it, but after waiting for five minutes he didn't show up. The staging area for the camera department area was probably two hundred feet from where we were working and I hadn't had any lights installed along the way. He had gotten lost in this ten million gallon lake of ours. A search party was sent out from the set and he was found, thoroughly disoriented by the blackness and lack of landmarks.

The director of the second unit, Ricou Browning, was a practical joker and so were all of his divers. ONe of Ricou's favorite tricks was to mess around with your air supply. He would start turning your air off while you were gearing up to dive. Every time you turned away from him, he would give your tank valve a turn. By the time you went in the water it was about a half a turn from being completely closed. Then he would wait until you were engrossed in something, watch for the bubbles coming out of your regulator as you exhaled and give it the final turn. Those that panicked were watched more closely in the future as possible liabilities. Tying your dry suit zipper to someone else's was another favorite trick. When you moved apart the zippers opened and an inrush of freezing water was the result. Another one was tying a bucket to someone's ankle and filling it with air. You went up to the surface upside down, fast. Lots of fun.

Communications underwater are ordinarily carried out by hand signals. However, we were working in the dark, so this would not work. We had some regulators fitted with ultrasonic communication devices and they did solve the problem for the most part. Ricou and I could talk to each other and the surface and the rest of the crew work hearing-aids so they could hear what was going on.

Lighting was a whole new ball game. It was not too difficult to make a gloomy, dark look; all I had to do was to make a bank of lights roughly at right angles to the camera, some 20-30 feet back. However, the lights that the salvors used, which in full-size versions towered ten feet high, were only seven inches high in our scale. Somehow we had to come up with small lamps that would light the ship and look like the real thing. Since all of the R&D money had been spent on this long before I came onto the project, we had to come up with something there in our workshops on Malta. MR-16 bulbs proved to be the answer. Originally designed as lamps for slide and movie projectors, they have a small quartz bulb fused in the center of a small reflector. Today they have found wide use in hi-tech track lighting, display lighting and a host of other uses. A mold was made in order to cast the lamp structures out of resin and three of the bulbs were installed in each unit. The wires to power them were hidden in the sand and eventually led to the surface. The big problem was that we had no way to encapsulate the bulbs, which meant that they had to operate directly in the seawater. Their life expectancy was something around two minutes, so we had lots of backups.At one time we lit all 55' of the wreck and must have used something like 50 of them for one shot.

The first of Kodak's high speed emulsions, 5294, was not yet on the market, so we were still at an ASA of 100 pushed one stop to ASA 200. This meant that given the brightness of the lights on the submarines, I had to shoot at a 2.8. At that stop, a 40mm lens with a +1 diopter would pull focus at 19", plus or minus one inch. That's right, two inches of depth of field! Actually, this worked out pretty well, since distant objects, such as the ship, were rendered soft by the cloudy water anyway. For some shots I used split diopters and got 28" focus on the other side of the screen.

May finally rolled around and after five months, the water was a balmy 60 degrees. We were finished with this project and ready to go home.

Never Say Never Again

A couple of years later Ricou called me again, this time to go to the Bahamas to do second unit on the James Bond film, Never Say Never Again. This was essentially a remake of Thunderball. We had a big sequence to shoot where Bond is being chased around and inside a wreck by a number of sharks. The other sequence involved the bad guys transporting an atomic bomb through a system of underwater caves, culminating in a battle royal. Did I say inside a wreck? With sharks? Yes, and as far as I know nobody has attempted this before or since.

After scouting a number of locations around Nassau, we settled on a patch of ocean that had been used for a number of other films. About 40' deep, again we could work all day without having to worry about decompression. Remnants of previous Bond epics littered the bottom, silently rusting, overgrown with lush marine growth. Nearby was a drop-off to over five thousand fet, known as the Tongue of the Ocean, a favorite haunt of U.S. submarines on maneuvers.

The wreck, provided by the Bahamian government, was the booty of a drug bust. One hundred twenty feet in length, her engines were removed, bulkheads replaced to facilitate our story, concrete ballast poured and valves installed, so that she could be sunk at our chosen site. The day of the sinking arrived and our wreck, covered with gunnite to simulate decades of marine growth and pumps roaring to keep her afloat, was positioned over the site. We went down to take a look. How often do you get to witness a ship sinking from underwater? She hit the bottom with a tremendous thud and a cloud of sand and debris, right on target.

We were in business. We had our set and the stunt doubles were ready. All we lacked were sharks. The Miami Seaquarium collection boat had been sent out to collect Tiger sharks. Tigers were chosen because of their availability; they looked sleek and ferocious and they did better than most sharks in captivity. It seems that they have the ability to pump water through their gills with their jaws better than most sharks, an important factor when they are kept motionless for long periods of time.

The collection boat would set hooks baited with frozen mackerel in the evening and return in the morning to see what had taken the bait. The fish would then be dragged into the "live well" where the hook would be removed carefully without putting any visible scars on the shark. This was a formidable task, as these sharks were highly agitated!

The first batch of sharks was a group ranging from 8 to 12 feet. Was I scared? Damn straight! They were awesome! We brought them out of the well one at a time, with ropes around their tails, and tied them off to some convenient coral heads. The shark handlers would sort of gang up on them, each man grabbing ont a fin and everyone staying well back from those murderous-looking jaws.

As they were not free-swimming, except when being filmed, they were slowed down by the lack of oxygen reaching their gills. This not only made them somewhat easier to handle, it would eventually cause their demise, because this oxygen starvation would cause them to slowly die. After about four or five days they would be so slow that they would be useless for further filming and so were destroyed. Why didn't we just let them go? We were afraid that they had become so used to the company of humans that one of them would wander to a local beach and eat some child and we did not want to chance it. I was told that in the month that it took to film this sequence we used some 65 sharks.

The shark handlers were told that since we were in open water, if they felt that the fish was getting out of their range to recapture they should disregard the shot and go in and get it. If he got away he was gone. Basically, the correct approach is to come down on top of the shark (his blind spot0 and grab one pectoral and the dorsal fin. ONe man could pretty well control a six-footer, but as they got larger, it took a lot more guys to slow one down. In fact, our largest sharks were 14' long and they proved to be a real handful. I remember one time, seeing the first man miss the dorsal fin and getting the tail instead. He was whipped around like a rag doll, mask, fins and regulator flying off of him like so much debris.

The fourteen-footers were tough to work with inside the wreck because they couldn't fit in the doorways without some considerable difficulty. Their pectoral fins were too wide and it took a lot of coaching to get them through. I always had my escape routes carefully planned. If the shark went over me I would wait until the shot was over, drop the camera and grab for the nearest door sill. With a strong pull I would be propelled outside of the wreck. One of the shark handlers joked, "Never mind the shark, just don't get in Steadman's way when he bails out."

One shot was of the shark exiting the wheelhouse window. I was outside the window, looking in. It was another of these big babies and she had a lot of trouble getting through the window. When she finally broke the window frames, she came right at me and buried her nose in the lens shade. I was struggling mightily to keep the camera between her and myself, figuring that she would have to ingest the camera before she got to me. It was a quick trip to the bottom, some 30' before the safety men could get her turned away with their poles.

We tried bang-sticks as safety armament for a while, but none of us had much faith in their ability to slow down a really angry shark. Then, when one of the shark handlers vaporized his thumb while loading one, we said forget it. From then on we used long pointed poles to turn a shark away, when necessary.

The Arri III had made its appearance by this time and we had one as our A camera. Fitted with a Panavision 30mm anamorphic lens behind a dome port, it was otherwise stock. The other camera was IIC and had 40mm and Macro-Panatar lenses behind a flat port. It was used for close ups and the magnification of the flat port worked here in our favor.

Lighting was fairly straightforward. At the time there were no HMI underwater units, so the 1000W Par incandescent was our only weapon. Extra long tails were soldered directly to the bulbs and then sealed with a marine sealant. If I needed a large source I would gang a bunch of them up on a stand set well back from the wreck. Inside, they were about the right size All of the cables led down from our dive boast where they were powered by a small generator on deck. Still, an f/2.8 was about all we could get inside the wreck.

With 30mm and 40mm lenses this meant a considerable amount of follow-focusing. Distances were taped, just as if we were working on the surface. The assistants had a tough job, because they were in a very vulnerable spot, without the protection of the camera itself.

Going back to working with 6 and 8 footers seemed anticlimactic after the big ones because they looked like puppy dogs by comparison. Looks can be deceiving. One day we were doing some simple passbys with a 7-foot shark. Usually, when you release a shark in open water, he will do everything possible to get away and regain his freedom. This one, however, would turn back and try to take a piece out of someone. One of the handlers narrowly missed having his midsection slimmed down and the disgruntled fish left with a rubber flipper in his mouth as a consolation prize. We gave that one a pass.

After a month of this madness, we finished with the sharks and were off to do the cave sequence with the bad guys and the atomic bomb. It was a whole different kind of madness.

Located in the backwoods on the island of Grand Bahama, Ben's Hole is reached by lowering a ladder down a small hole in the ground. Once down the ladder, it opens to a large room with a small lake in it. A dive to 80' takes you to a large chamber filled with stalactites and stalagmites, but to get down to 80', you have to travel some 200' horizontally. If you get in trouble down there, it is a long way to go to the surface.

The chamber was huge, about the size of a medium sound stage. Because the floor was full of broken limestone boulders, stalagmites, etc. lights could not be mounted on stands. Besides, there weren't any stands tall enough. The ceiling was smooth and nothing could be attached to it. One of my guys came up with a brilliant solution. We had an extra hose attached to his regulator that allowed him in inflate an inner tube wherever he wanted it. After the inner tube floated firmly up against the ceiling, a plank was lashed to it and lights attached to the plank. The cables were lashed together and buoyed with styrofoam, then led back to the surface. We set perhaps three of these rigs with 3-4 lights apiece and we had the place lit.

Visibility was superb when we first entered the cave, but without any current, it became cloudier by the hour as more and more divers went about their tasks. We had it rigged in a day and then hoped that it would settle and clear overnight before we began to shoot. The next day the visibility was indeed improved, but filming became a race against time because every time you touched either the ceiling or bottom, fresh clouds of silt would be stirred up.

The cave had an interesting phenomenon. At the top, it was filled with fresh water that had seeped down through the limestone. At the bottom, there was salt water that came from the sea, about two miles distant. Where the two waters mixed, there was a boundary called a halocline. The salt water was perhaps 6-7 degrees warmer than the fresh water and its index of refraction was quite different. As the waters mixed there was an effect like funhouse mirrors. Someone three feet away would be rendered totally unrecognizable. Sink just a few feet deeper and the effect would disappear totally.

Voyage From Antiquity

After finishing Never Say Never Again, I wrote an article on it for the American Cinematographer (Oct. 1983). Jack Kelly, an Oklahoma oilman, read the article and called me up. "How would you like to go to Turkey this summer and photograph the exploration of the world's oldest known shipwreck?" You can guess my answer.

As a kid I had always been fascinated by Cousteau's documentaries, especially the ones about ancient shipwrecks. I think that if you stay in the business long enough and put out the right energy, you get to do just about everything that you want.

The wreck had been discovered by sponge divers off the southern coast of Turkey in 150-180' of water. They had been offered a bounty by the archaeologists of the Institute of Nautical Archeology, Texas A&M, for discovering anything that was of sufficient interest to be excavated. After the first survey, sufficient interest was aroused. The archeologists, headed by Dr. George Bass, were sure that the wreck dated to the late Bronze Age and was probably some 3,400 years old.

To put that into some sort of perspective, Tutankhamen was the boy king of Egypt at the time and Athens was nothing more than a little settlement. When Christ was born, the wreck was already 1,400 years old! When we came up form my first dive on the site, I remarked that there was pottery all over the place in the shallower waters of the slope. Dr. Bass said, "Oh, don't bother with all of that stuff, it is probably just Byzantine junk." I remarked at another time that it would be great if we found a coin on the wreck. The original would of course go into the museum, but we could have an impression made and everybody would leave with a great souvenir. Dr. Bass retorted that he couldn't imagine a worse thing to happen. "If this wreck is as old as I think it is, coins haven't been invented for another 700 years!"

This was a whole different kind of diving for me. For one thing, it was deep. Working every day at 170 feet means decompression and lots of it. We made two dives a day with a surface interval of more than six hours. This allowed us twenty minutes from the time we left the surface to the time we left the bottom. The decompression times were about 18 minutes on the morning dive and 22 minutes on the afternoon dive. Decompression is a boring affair. On days when the current was running we would be holding on to a steel bucket suspended from the boat like so many commuters waving in the breeze. On calm days we would try to read one of the paperbacks we had placed in the bucket. This worked ok, but turning the pages was tricky as the waterlogged paper would tear easily and you would lose the thread of the narrative.

We had a recompression chamber on our dive boat and a doctor trained in hyperbaric medicine, but we were very conservative nonetheless. On the passage down to the dive site from Bodrum, we put into a small fishing village for the night. There was a young sponge diver there who had been brought to our boat the previous summer for treatment of the bends. It was too late for him, for there was permanent nerve damage. We visited him to see if there was anything we could do to make his lifer easier. He was lying on a bed in the shade of an olive tree, his legs withered, unable to move or feel anything below his navel. It was a sobering scene. After that, we decided that a few extra minutes decompressing was good insurance.

With bottom times short, the work was slow. Archaeologists are a painstaking lot as well and nothing is removed from the bottom until it had been photographed, mapped and thoroughly measured in relation to all of its adjacent objects. Stereoscopic mapping techniques are employed and the results are as accurate as if the site were on dry land.

After anchoring over the site, work was begun on the shore facilities. We were kind of out in the middle of nowhere, about a two hour boat ride from the nearest town. The shore was a limestone cliff that went up in giant steps to over 100'. All of the water had to be brought in by boat. Using a boatload of junk lumber, mosquito netting for walls and a thatch roof, we constructed a sort of a building that housed twenty, with a conservatory on the lower level. This conservatory had large tubs built into the rock for fresh water baths to desalt the various objects as they were brought up. The major job of conservation, however, would be done back at the museum in Bodrum.

At first, there was a lot of sand to be removed from the site, but the airlifts that you see in treasure hunting were used only sparingly, as the loss of the tiniest of objects could rob us of important clues.

After about a month of excavation it became necessary to remove a large jar that was lying on its side in the middle of the site. A cargo net was spread out on the sand next to it and the jar was rolled ont it. To our surprise, small pieces of pottery spilled from the neck of the jar. There was a small decanter for oil and a number of small oil lamps that looked like small saucers with a pinched end for a wick. Work was immediately halted and we called a conference on the surface. We theorized that over the last three millennia (that is millennia, not centuries) countless octopi could have pulled these objects into the jar to feather their nests. In any case, the diver with the longest arm would be detailed to remove what he could before the jar was further disturbed. There were more oil lamps, but they were neatly nested together, packed by the hand of man and had lain undisturbed for over three thousand years.

I took two Arri SR's with me, both with underwater housings and a Rebikoff underwater camera. The SR's were to do double duty, both on the site and on the surface. Their housings were marketed by Arri and designed to use the Angenieux 9.5-57mm zoom behind flat ports. I don't like flat ports because they magnify and darken the image and the longer end of the zoom is generally useless. However, the Kinoptic 5.7mm is about the same size as the zoom and we thought that we could fit a dome port that would keep it a true wide angle. Rebikoff had a 10mm with a corrective port and proved to be a great general purpose camera. These were great depths however, and the Arri housings had problems keeping the water out at anything exceeding 120'. They were not catastrophic floodings, but were more like a slow drip of water on the inside of the dome. Of course, once you had a drop on the inside of the dome it would be right in the middle of the picture, so that would abort the dive. Eventually we worked these problems out, but it was without any outside help, as we were a long way from civilization.

The water was very clear. If you were to stop at the hundred-foot level, the dive boat would be clearly visible on the surface and you could make out divers below on the site. There was plenty of light as well. As I remember, we had something like an f/5.6, but the light was blue, blue, blue. I brought two 1000w underwater quartz lights and their warmth brought some real color to the scene. However, with 200' of cable stretching to the surface, a slight current could cause some real problems.

Nitrogen narcosis, the "rapture of the deep," was another problem to be dealt with. If you have ever had nitrous oxide at the dentist's office, you have some idea of what this is like. It would usually kick in at about a hundred feet and get progressively worse. At 175', you were really stoned. I remember the first day that we took both the Arri and Rebikoff cameras down. I set the Rebikoff down and proceeded to shoot with the Arri. I then handed the Arri to Mike Ferris, my assistant, and looked down for the Rebikoff. It was gone. Now at this pint I am not too rational and paranoia is creeping into my consciousness. Someone has taken it, I thought. No, that is clearly irrational, we are the only two down here. I decided to make a quick bounce dive down the slope to see if it had slipped from the place where I put it. No luck. I motioned Mike to join me in the phone booth for a parley. The phone booth is a plexiglas hemisphere full of air that is firmly anchored to the bottom Two divers can stand in it and have a conversation. Well, sort of, because at those depths you are talking with five times the density of air and you sound like Donald Duck. All of this was tremendously funny. Meanwhile, the camera in question had slowly floated to the surface, causing some speculation amongst the crew on the boat as to what our fate might be. Anyway, by the time Mike had recovered the camera, our bottom time was just about shot, so that ended that dive.

At the end of two months, we had barely scratched the surface and the archaeologists were to return for another eight seasons. The film is called Voyage to Antiquity and has aired numerous times on Nova and National Geographic Explorer. The December 1987 edition of the Geographic has our exp edition as its cover story. I still have friends from that expedition and look forward to going back to Turkey some day.

Underwater filming is oftentimes dangerous, frustratingly slow and totally at the mercy of the elements. But the rewards are great. I think that short of being an astronaut, this is just about the most foreign element that man can place himself in.

There are just two cardinal rules that apply to shooting underwater:

• Don't hold your breath.
• Keep the water out of the camera.

The rest, you just have to make up as you go along.