Description
LOCATION: Indonesia
STORY BEHIND THE SHOT: There’s no way to predict a school of this magnitude appearing at any given moment, but as the old saying goes, “luck = preparation + opportunity”. That preparation, began, as most of my images do, with a sketch on paper. Inspired by a photo shot before I was born in an old National Geographic Magazine, I sketched out my version of that photo while I was just a little kid, and that was the very first sketch was the very first of it’s kind – a sketch that would become a photo that would become art that my future career would be based on.
Back when I lived in Papua New Guinea, I was first introduced to massive schools of these yellowtail fusiliers (Caesio teres). And back then (and in other South Pacific locations throughout the years), I had located some schools, but the shape of the school, or the water clarity, or the sunlight, or some other factor wasn’t quite right. So when this unexpected surprise presented itself to me at the very beginning of a dive in the Misool Eco-Protected area of West Papua, I knew the moment had arrived, and spent over an hour becoming one with the school, feeling their patterns, and letting them become accustomed to my presence, until the last breath was sucked from my scuba tank. After a few minutes, they accepted me into their school, no longer afraid of my exhalation bubbles. The only thing that would disturb the peace was once every 5-8 minutes, a giant trevalley would come screaming out of the distance, snagging one fusilier, and dragging it off out of sight into the deep blue. Within moments, the school (minus 1) was reformed, like nothing had hapenned. I stayed with this school for the entire dive until my tank was empty, drifting with the current, and over that ~70 minutes I’m not really sure how far I drifted, but the boat driver had been following my bubbles and drifting above the entire time as well.
TO PURCHASE BLUE MAN GROUP AS A FINE ART PRINT ON ALUMINUM: BMG is quite easily cropped into different shapes, so feel free to get creative! While we offer it here to purchase online mostly in 3:2 ratio horizontal aluminum prints, Ask our design team about how this print can be a square, a thin, long horizontal panoramic, or even cropped into a vertical. It’s quite flexible for custom art up to 300″ wide!