Filming the Glow

You can sometimes get a shot. It takes a two-second exposure and it comes out blurry.

What you are risking for that blurry photo is the phone itself, because salt water kills them. An underwater housing that will actually hold up costs around fifteen hundred dollars.

And there is a second cost. Your phone screen is at least 150 nits. The dinoflagellates give off about 0.01. Your screen is fifteen thousand times brighter than what you came to see, and one look at it resets your eyes for another fifteen minutes.

Leave it. I will film it for you.

I did not start filming because video would be good marketing. It became that later.

I started because no two nights were alike, and every night disappeared when it ended. I wanted to take home a piece of what the bay had given me.

Then I noticed I was also recording other people entering the water and receiving their own answer. The footage was no longer proof that somebody took a tour. It was a record that another human being had gone into these waters and been answered.

Natural phenomena are not guaranteed to us forever. I know these waters glow today. I do not know what they will look like in fifty or a hundred years.

So the camera became memory, and then it became an archive. Hundreds of nights, under different moons, seasons and weather. It is not scientific monitoring and I will never call it that.

But if one day somebody asks what La Parguera looked like when I was in it night after night, I want the answer to be better than "you should have seen it."

• A full-frame, back-illuminated sensor built for low light.
• The fastest lens I could get, used wide open at T1.2.
• Manual focus, set by hand. Autofocus is useless out there.
• Shutter locked at 1/30. Twenty-four frames per second, locked.
• ISO is the only thing that moves.

Because everything else is locked, the ISO becomes my reading of how bright the water is that night. On the best nights I am at 80,000. On the worst, 240,000. Most nights land somewhere between.

Why I use the equipment I use

The camera reads the real wavelength, and it is blue. Your eyes, in the dark, read it as white. I explain this on every departure, before you get in.

What it really looks like

On every departure I am in the water with you, filming. The footage is delivered to you afterwards.