AMAZING LIVES
Don Kincaid | Continued all the way down to Fort Zachary Taylor. I would spend three to fours hours a day, sometimes more than that, with an inner tube, a peach basket and snorkeling gear.
VLWas the water clearer back then? DKYes, it was. It was pretty common to have 30 to 60 feet of visibility back then. Now you are very lucky to get it at 30 feet, and it’s mostly about 10 or 15 feet.
VL Could you see the coral? DK Oh, yeah. It was in great shape. I still have the photo- graphs I took back then. Tey aren’t great photographs be- cause I was just learning underwater photography, but you can see that the corals are in much, much better condition, and I’ve done a lot of flying down here. It was probably the late 1970s or early 1980s when the visibility started dropping, but you could see all the coral heads from the airplane when we’d go over the water.
VLWere you flying your own plane? DKWell, I’ve done some of that. My dad is a pilot, but mostly I flew for photography. Believe it or not, but aerial photography and underwater photography are very closely related. It’s just that the water is thicker then the air is. Te reason the sky is blue and the ocean is blue is because both the water and the air filter the light so that you get that blue light. Tey are related, so I use the same filters and the same type of lenses and stuff in aerial photography as you would use in underwater photography.
VL You developed an interest and a love of underwater photography being near the ocean and the sea, then you went to the U.S. Army, correct? DK I wanted to do photography when I was a little kid. When I would tell somebody that I saw this great big fish, nobody believed me, so I decided I was going to take pic- tures and prove it. I realized very early on that I didn’t know enough about photography to do the pictures prop- erly, so when it came time for me to go to college, I wanted to go to an underwater photography school in California. Unfortunately, it was so expensive and was just way beyond my means, so I decided if I went into the mili- tary and took photography in it, I would be able to get a half-way decent education and practice it when I got out, then develop it whatever way I wanted to. When I went into the military after basic training, I went to motion pic- ture school in New Jersey and graduated first in my class there, then they sent me to a place called the Army Picto- rial Center which is in New York City and was the old As- toria Studios that were used up until World War II. It’s where a lot of the Marx Brothers films were made, and it was a full-on, Hollywood studio. When I got out of the
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