Colleen’s upside down world photographer – Unnamed
Colleen Slater
Underwater Photography – My Crazy Passion
I learned to dive in 1978. After a gap of 32 years, I went to the Philippines to do coral reef conservation and began to teach myself underwater photography.
The underwater environment changes your sensory perception of the world. Everything slows down, light behaves differently, colours shift, sounds are louder and tiny details that most people would never notice suddenly feel like entire stories waiting to be captured. And that’s where my photography lives — somewhere between curiosity, patience, and a bit of stubborn determination.
Underwater photography isn’t easy. Sometimes the visibility is terrible, sometimes the subject disappears the second you get your camera ready, and sometimes your gear that worked perfectly on land doesn’t work at all. But that’s part of what makes it addictive. – every dive feels like a treasure hunt with the feeling that there’s always something new down there that I, and possibly nobody else, has seen before.
I want to share a bit of that world with you — not just the photos, but the moments behind them, the challenges, the surprises, and the reasons I keep going back underwater with a camera.