This was shot in the Bahamas, hosted by Stuart's Cove Dive Center on the other side of the island from Nassau. Depth was about 55 feet. The videographer on the left is JP Genasi, who at the time (1998) was on the credits of all the underwater shark video then shown on Discovery Channel and the like. I shot this on 35mm film with a Nikonis V and Nikonis 15mm lens, with a large Nikonis U/W flash. That being an ultra-wide lens, I'm about 3 feet from the action.

These are Reef Sharks, 6-7 feet long. There were between a dozen and two dozen sharks vying for the fish bait. A group of a dozen or so divers were in a large circle, resting on sand just above the several thousand foot deep wall that rings the island. The divemaster sat in the center our circle and fed the sharks, which came up over the wall and then in between all the divers. So the effect was sharks coming from every direction all at once. Much fun!

I had the privilege of running my hand down the side of a couple of sharks. Very interesting feel, like sandpaper. If we wanted to touch the sharks we were not allowed to wear gloves because that might hurt the sharks. We were also advised not to grab their tails. Duhhh...

JP Is holding a video camera with one hand, and feeding the shark with the other hand. I have a copy of the video, and watched him prepare it after the dive. It is a commercial grade video, fully edited in camera during the dive. Back on land, all he did was add a music sound track. It was one of the most the most amazing things I've ever seen.

I have a copy of the video, and in the video I see my flash going off when this image was shot. Very cool.

I did a series of shark dives over a 3 day period. Including one in 6,000 feet of water in the proximity of a US Navy research buoy. That was an interesting dive because I had never done one before (or since) in "blue water" where the ocean bottom could not be seen. It was an interesting visual sensation, somewhat like skydiving where there are no close points of reference (except the buoy anchor line, which was what I used for my reference).

We also did a Bull Shark dive but I was not happy with the images, mainly due to bad scatter from sand kicked up during the dive. Because Bull Sharks are considered one of 3 or 4 maneater species, the divemasters fed them with 6 foot long sticks instead of by hand :-)

The dive imaged here, though, was by far the best, photographically, with the most and closest sharks.