stretchthepenn
Contributor
What's the one thing that always goes wrong for you when scuba diving? (Let's define it broadly and count anything from repeated, unfortunate incidents that are totally out of your control, all the way to to skills that you've had trouble mastering.)
My personal scuba-related curse is being unable to get an underwater photo of myself.
During my OW checkout dive in late '96, the instructor took a photo of me and enclosed it with my certification card. I really appreciated that; the picture made a nice memento, and I still have the original print. Shortly afterward, I took my AOW class from the same fellow, and for one of the skillset dives, he lent the entire class point-and-shoot cameras so we could putz around and have some fun taking pictures. My buddy and I shot an entire roll of film--mostly of each other brandishing our dive knives and "wrestling" with killer kelp--but when we surfaced, the instructor popped the camera open without rewinding the film, and our tough-guy posing was irretrievably lost.
That experience set the tone for the next 20 years. From 1996 until 2016, I had absolutely ZERO success in obtaining a photo of myself underwater. I have plenty of topside photos, and lots of other divers took my picture underwater...but none of them ever shared so much as a single pixel. Sure...I saw the pictures on people's cameras post-dive, and I gave my email addresses to all those photographers, and I looked at the dive shop FB pages where I was told the photos would be appearing... But no. Nothing. Ever.
It drove me nuts.
My personal scuba-related curse is being unable to get an underwater photo of myself.
During my OW checkout dive in late '96, the instructor took a photo of me and enclosed it with my certification card. I really appreciated that; the picture made a nice memento, and I still have the original print. Shortly afterward, I took my AOW class from the same fellow, and for one of the skillset dives, he lent the entire class point-and-shoot cameras so we could putz around and have some fun taking pictures. My buddy and I shot an entire roll of film--mostly of each other brandishing our dive knives and "wrestling" with killer kelp--but when we surfaced, the instructor popped the camera open without rewinding the film, and our tough-guy posing was irretrievably lost.
That experience set the tone for the next 20 years. From 1996 until 2016, I had absolutely ZERO success in obtaining a photo of myself underwater. I have plenty of topside photos, and lots of other divers took my picture underwater...but none of them ever shared so much as a single pixel. Sure...I saw the pictures on people's cameras post-dive, and I gave my email addresses to all those photographers, and I looked at the dive shop FB pages where I was told the photos would be appearing... But no. Nothing. Ever.
It drove me nuts.
