When I was a little girl all I wanted to be was a diver—just like my parents. And also an astronaut thanks to a mild obsession with Apollo 13 and anything to do with the space program.
But I also had the gift of art and words. I excelled in art classes in high school, but then decided to it tuck the hobby away for a long time, toughing it out through math and physics courses, pursuing a degree in Engineering and ultimately landing in the Economics department (talk about math!). During those college years though, I spent a large part of my time of my time teaching the Fun Physics of the SCUBA diving. Then I found underwater photography.
It was my dad, the engineer, who insisted I take his underwater camera and strobe for a trip. Because Dad is also an artist—a musician with a harmonica always in his pocket, and photographer, who spent years shooting underwater before I came along.
A few days after I was born, my parents brought me home to our house full of fish portraits and a darkroom in the basement. This was my destiny. My legacy. It never occurred to me to pursue until I was packing for a dive trip to The Bahamas an said, “Here, take this. Let me give you the quick rundown: a physics lesson.”
Because photography is physics—art physics.
And put a camera into a little box full of o-rings and take it to a place where the light disappears and you’re weightless… well, that was as close to astronaut as I was going to get at 22 years old.
It took one dive with that little camera and a big ol’ strobe to get me hooked. All of my worlds—science, diving, art—collided in those 40 minutes I was underwater in Nassau, and I haven’t looked back.
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