FARMINGTON – Who’d think an underwater photographer would choose to live in Maine, about as far as one can get (in the lower 48, anyway) from the stuff most underwater photo stories are made of – colorful coral reefs, multicolored fish and, lest one forget, swim-able water?
But New Jersey-bred photographer Bill Curtsinger, whose recently published book “Extreme Nature: Images from the World’s Edge” presents many of his favorite photographs from the 33 National Geographic stories he has published, chose to do just that.
The approximately 180 people who crammed into the University of Maine at Farmington’s Thomas Auditorium Wednesday to hear the Yarmouth-based photographer, who “moved to Maine as soon as he could,” discuss his work learned quickly of his preference for cold, rather than warm water.
“There’s hardly a photo of a coral reef in this book at all,” he said a few minutes into his talk. “I don’t do a lot of coral reefs, I’ve never been into it.” What people hope to see when snorkeling in reefs in more balmy climes can be found just as easily off the Maine coast, Curtsinger insisted, pointing to a strangely-shaped bright red object on a slide he said was a fish.
“You don’t have to go to a coral reef to see beautiful color,” he said. More slides followed, of brilliantly colored schools of fish in hundreds of shades of green and tan. They were alewives and herring, he said, the most plebeian of fish – so little prized in America they are used as lobster bait.
Curtsinger described his four assignments to the Antarctic, where he spent about 18 months of his life trying “to immerse myself in an animal’s world so that I can extract from those movements a new image, or a new insight into behavior heretofore unseen,” according to Extreme Nature’s introduction.
His photographic career began when he was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. “It was not what I wanted to do,” he said. But he requested a post in the Navy – “I always had that water thing” – he said. Each time opportunities arose, he volunteered, becoming a Naval photographer and even going on his first assignment to the Antarctic, photos from which helped him win his first National Geographic job just “30 days out of the Navy.”
He loves photographing in the Antarctic because it has never been settled by humans, making possible encounters with penguins.
Some of the children in the audience squealed as the photographer explained how he got his up-close images of Emperor penguins. Emperor penguins are the tallest animals on the Antarctic ice, he said, and “get freaked” when people walk or stand upright. But “if you sit down on the ice and just stay low, these penguins will walk up to you, in a curious way,” he said.
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