Eight Photographs,One Ocean

I have spent more than a decade in the water with a camera. Eight of those photographs now hang in our shop as museum-grade prints, sold by My Clean Ocean, with the profit going to the youth programs. This is what each one is, where it was taken, and why it made the cut.

A quick word on how it works. I license the images to the nonprofit. My Clean Ocean sells the print, has it made to order in the USA on HD metal, HD acrylic or archival paper, and keeps the profit for Blue Lens, Citizen Science and the Youth Ocean Experience. A print is a purchase rather than a donation, so there is no tax receipt, but the money ends up in the same place: a young person on a boat, in the water, behind a camera.

The Coronado Islands sit just south of San Diego in Mexican waters and hold one of the most dependable sea lion colonies on this coast. Young sea lions are the ocean's great show-offs. They leave the rocks to inspect anything new, and if you hold still they come in close. The Greeting is that approach, eyes forward and whiskers lit. The Acrobat is the banking turn a juvenile throws when it wants you to watch.

Shortfin makos are built like tuna, with a crescent tail and a body made for speed. They are rarely photographed this close and this calm. The Mako hangs a foot beneath a flat surface off California, and the water above acts as a mirror, so the shark shares the frame with its own reflection.

Blue sharks are slender, long-finned travellers of the open ocean. Off Southern California they come in close to boats in blue water far from shore, where there is nothing in the frame but the animal and light. Big Blue is one shark, mouth open, under shafts of sun. The Gathering is several, the nearest sharp and the others soft in the distance, which is what the water really looks like when you are in it.

When predators push a school from below, sardines pack into a sphere that moves like a single animal, splitting and reforming in seconds. From inside the water it is sound as much as sight, a hiss of thousands of bodies turning at once. The Sardine Run freezes one of those turns. It is the most graphic print of the set, an abstract from across the room and a crowd of individual fish up close.

South Australia is one of the few places on Earth where large white sharks can be photographed reliably in clear water. Most white shark pictures are taken in open blue. The Escort has a kelp-covered reef under the animal, which gives it scale and place: a predator moving over the country it belongs to.

A spy hop is when a whale holds itself upright at the surface to look at what is above it, including the boat. The Spy Hop is flat grey water, soft light and one orca looking back. It is the quiet one of the eight, and a natural partner to one of the shark frames.

Photographs are how I came to care about the ocean, and they are how we teach the kids in Blue Lens to see it. Selling them is the most direct way I know to turn a picture into a day on the water for a young person who has never had one. If you would rather give directly, a donation does the same job with a tax receipt. And if you want to understand what the pictures are protecting, start with our guide to ocean conservation in Southern California.

Every one of these animals is still out there. The print is a way to keep looking.