David Sacks - June Artist of the Month at the Patty Turner Center

David Sacks - SeaSighting, Underwater Photography

The magic of photography was evident to me at a very young age. I was six or seven years old as I watched my father teach my older brother the steps of black-and-white print development. I remember seeing the images in trays of funny-smelling liquid tilted from side. I never got to “play,” but what I saw stayed with me.

I bought my first camera while still in high school, a Yashika-Mat 120 EM Twin Lens Reflex. That camera is still with me, along with many of the negatives it produced.

It wasn’t until I lived in my own home with my wife and had given up raising cichlids that I created my own darkroom out of a third of my basement. I lived down there four to five hours a day, four or five days a week. I enjoyed every minute in that dark room for about twenty years.

Move forward a dozen years when I was introduced to SCUBA. Until then, a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus had only been an oddity seen on a TV series. I was truly awed when I found myself sitting on the floor of a twelve foot deep swimming pool, breathing normally. However, it took another 10 years before I found the time to devote to really learning SCUBA. Now I have discovered it is a lifelong learning process.

As in many things in life timing is everything. On my first real diving vacation, I was introduced to a digital SLR with an underwater housing and strobes. The marriage between photography and diving began.

From that time until now, I’ve tried to use my skills as a photographer to reveal ocean life to the public. I want people to see what may be lost through our negligence, lack of understanding and refusal to believe facts. Coastal oil drilling, general pollution and global warming all kill phytoplankton, the sea creatures that are the smallest form of life. These in turn feed larger life forms. In short, human life depends on the health of the oceans through the foods we eat and also the air we breathe. Over seventy percent of earth's oxygen is produced by the oceans. Alsp, two thirds of the world population lives within forty miles of an ocean. And the oceans produce food for one sixth of the world population. Yet, we continue offshore drilling and discharge waste from the coastal communities.

Please view and enjoy my images, some of which were captured off the southeast corner of an island called Sulawesi, Indonesia, in early December, 2010 and others in May 2011 in the Philippines.

If I have moved and educated any viewer to take action, I will consider myself a successful photographer.

Thank You