Photography
winters in Ontario have been brutally cold—complete with record cold snaps. You also have to remember that Tobermory is in northern Ontario. I’ve dived the area in mid-May when the water was hovering at just above zero. Under those conditions my max bottom time was about 25 minutes and I surfaced with a blinding headache, burning hands and a determination to never get in the water that early again. Undeterred by the cold, Jerzy
and his companions set out to begin what would become a two- year project spanning six trips and a lot of very cold diving. Vincze was the advance man. Jerzy explains, “Zsolt lives in Tobermory and runs a business there. He was our scout to see if conditions were perfect for our shots.” Perfect, meant shifting ice that would allow the group to get maximum light under the ice. They began by identifying the perfect spots for their dives. This wasn’t going to be typical ice diving with a hole cut in a solid sheet of ice, a tender and lines connecting all divers to the surface. “This was more like diving among ice fl oes,” says Jerzy, “We had to fi nd a protected area where the wind would not blow the ice in and seal off our entrance.” They identifi ed two potential dive sites: The Lighthouse, an entry point on the north side of Big Tug Harbour; and The Tugs, another shore dive located on the east shore of Little Tug Harbour. They recruited a surfaced tender and treated the whole dive as if it were a cave dive, running a continuous line from their entry point to where they went to work. Jerzy said the system worked well but that he kept a very close eye on the surface, “If something moved, I signaled my group and we moved closer to the entrance.” Their luck didn’t always hold.
Kim says, “The last time we went the ice blew in and covered our exit point.” The divers kicked their contingency plan into gear and moved towards a backup exit point. “We knew the area so well, we found another exit point. Tobermory is like diving in my living room I’ve been there so much,” says Kim. Aside from the ice, they also had to deal with the bitter cold. Their
32 Magazine
longest dive was 62 minutes. “At the end of that dive, my fi ngers were so cold,” Jerzy recalled, “I couldn’t feel it when I pushed the shutter.” Kim says the cold didn’t bother him. A former South Korean Navy saturation diver, he says that he grew so used to the cold that it doesn’t even register anymore. And the challenges the team
faced to get these images weren’t just related to their time in the water. In the early spring this year, as they were getting ready to return from a weekend of diving it started to snow. “When we started our drive home a snow storm blew in. We couldn’t stay because Steve needed to get back.” The road turned into solid ice on the stretch between Tobermory and Wiarton. It took four hours of white knuckle driving to cross that section (it normally takes 45 minutes.) “I felt okay, but I was worried about all the other drivers smashing into us.” But in the end, the results of
enduring the challenges speak for themselves. “It was the beauty of the light passing through the ice that drew me in,” Jerzy notes. He says he didn’t machine gun shoot the subject, rather he watched and waited for the right shots to come along. “I watch the surface.
I’m
looking for the light and the ice composition.” Initially it took a little experimentation to see what worked. “I try to get shots from deeper areas to get my divers in silhouette, then I set up my strobes for maximum light to get the divers faces.” For Jerzy the whole exercise was
to try and get the perfect shot—not to satisfy anyone else but himself. At the end of the project, he’d only taken about 120 pictures but says he’s happy with about 90 percent of them. Jerzy shoots with a Nikon D800E in an Aquatica housing and D161 Ikelite strobes. His favourite dive site: wreck
of the Alice G. Jerzy says in his opinion that’s the most photogenic
background the team worked with. His biggest worry… there may be no chance to do this in the foreseeable future. “The last two winters have been exceptionally cold,” he observes. Meantime, we’ve got the images
that Jerzy already shot to paint a picture of a unique and truly beautiful underwater world.
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