Under the Waves with Karim Iliya, April 2019

This month’s feature:

We had a string of murky water days, possibly the result of a large algae bloom. For many days, the clarity was terrible, and then the jellyfish appeared. We had 2 days of seeing jellyfish without whales before I finally saw my opportunity as a jellyfish drifted past a humpback whale and her calf in the depths. I felt I only had one chance. Not wanting to disturb their rest, I let all the air out of my lungs to sink without moving my limbs, dropping slowly into the depths, my empty lungs compressing. Focusing the camera underwater with thousands of particles is very difficult. There was no time to swap my cameraʼs focus setting, and as the jellyfish drifted in the current, I wondered if my opportunity was drifting with it. Itʼs not fun holding your breath when you have no air in your lungs, and no time to breathe up. I took a few photos and then I was done. Desperate for air, I kicked up to the surface. There were many things that had to line up for me to capture this photo of two very different species passing by, one the size of a tennis ball, the other the size of a bus, possibly not even aware of each other.