ScubaHankNYCLight, Shadow and Sea – A Black and White Short Film
This month, I had the chance to share a new short film at the New York Underwater Photographic Society’s March meeting. The theme was black and white, which made it a natural opportunity to step away from color and focus on something more elemental — contrast, silhouette, texture, and the way light behaves underwater.
“Light, Shadow and Sea” is built around the tension between illumination and darkness. Underwater, light is never fixed. It scatters, softens, disappears, and sometimes cuts through the water in a way that gives even familiar subjects a completely different presence. That shifting relationship became the foundation for this piece.
Rather than leaning on color, the film focuses on form, movement, and atmosphere. Some sequences feel quiet and weightless. Others feel heavier, more imposing, and almost theatrical. Black and white helped simplify the frame and bring those shifts forward more deliberately.
The footage moves across very different underwater environments and subjects, from drifting jellyfish in Mozambique and the shadowed presence of sand tiger sharks off North Carolina, to whale sharks and schooling fish in the Philippines, before narrowing in on the smaller, more intricate details of Indonesia’s macro world. I did not want it to feel like a destination reel. It was really more of an exercise in mood, contrast, and structure beneath the surface.
I also took a little creative liberty at the end by closing on two subjects that were naturally black and white. That felt like an appropriate way to bring the film full circle — ending on creatures whose patterns already carried the theme without needing any reinterpretation.
About NYUPS
For anyone landing here for the first time, NYUPS is the underwater imaging sub-group within Big Apple Divers, a dive club based in New York City. We meet monthly, and each meeting is built around a different subject, which makes it a great forum for sharing new work and revisiting older footage with a more specific creative goal in mind.
The black and white theme gave this project its structure from the start. It pushed me to think less about color and more about shadow, shape, and the way light defines a subject underwater.
More Projects from NYUPS
123 Next Page #bigAppleDivers #newYork #NewYorkUnderwaterPhotographicSociety #NYUPS
