Underwater Maldives (Stingrays)#

by members of the AirPano Team that is a member of the global-geography Consortium.

22 January 2012

with kind permission of AirPano

This sphere shot in warm waters of the Maldives Islands continues the series of our underwater spherical panoramas.

It's curious but fact: there are no civil helicopters on the Maldives and in order not to waste time lying on the beach I decided to dive with a camera. My first training classes took place in Moscow, in my apartment, in the bath full of water where, for the first time in my life, I, with great horror, have put the camera down...

Two days long I was moving between the bathroom and computer but, unfortunately, everything was in vain. The time had come to leave for the airport. As soon as I arrived on the Maldives and within a couple of days more I was training in a shoal standing waist-deep in water near the beach closed to my bungalow.

I knew all the local fish and all the stones at a distance of 50 meters. I was running from water into the room, to my notebook, then back to the sea and again to the notebook. The neighbors were tanning, drinking cocktails, looking at me and smiling. My head top and right palm, which had held the camera, sunburnt.

As a result, after two days experiments I changed the objective, methods of shooting, camera's adjustments and its handling principles. Afterwards, I rented a catamaran and left for the nearest coral reefs and exactly there, swimming with a mask, I tried to shoot the real spheres.

I succeeded. I made a few corrections more and understood that the time to dive into the deep had come. I attended a local diving club and signed up for a coming diving. 8 years had already passed since my last diving and I remembered almost nothing. But the instructor encouraged me: "Put the oxygen cylinder on and jump into water. There you will remember everything." And I jumped. In the beginning I felt fear and it was difficult, I had to give the camera to the instructor but later I, more or less, adapted and began to shoot independently.

Here it is the result.

1 Panorama of Underwater Maldives (Stingrays)