Cute Fishies Coming Soon
December 8, 2010 at 5:34 pm Tina Hay 5 comments
Fijian reef / photo by Jeremy Cohen
One of the stories we’ve been working on for the January-February issue is a photo essay featuring some gorgeous underwater images shot by a Penn State faculty member and administrator. Jeremy Cohen is an associate VP for undergraduate education and a professor of media studies in the College of Communications—and from the time he was a teenager, his avocation has been scuba diving and underwater photography.
This story came about in an interesting way. Bill Mahon ’94g, VP for university relations, one day happened to notice a bunch of framed underwater photos lining the walls of Jeremy’s office in Old Main. He asked Jeremy about them, one thing led to another, and Bill ended up deciding to have about 10 of them posted to the Penn State Facebook page. I happened to see them on Facebook and immediately sent the link to our art director, saying, “Let’s do a photo essay on these!”
Jeremy graciously shared a bunch of his images with us and spent a lot of time talking to me about the stories behind them, about the state of the world’s coral reefs, and about fellow Penn State faculty and students who share his interest in the oceans. It turns out that there’s a fair amount of oceanography going on at Penn State, including a minor in marine sciences—not bad for a landlocked campus.
So I’ve spent a lot of time today looking at cute little fishies and other sea creatures and looking up the correct spelling of things like nembrotha cristata nudibranch and flabellina rubrolineata. The one with the best name, as far as I’m concerned, is the threespot humbug.
(And the most hilarious looking are the white-eyed moray eels. Take a look at these guys if you don’t believe me.)
I’ve done a teensy bit of underwater photography myself—just while snorkeling, not scuba diving, and with a waterproof, relatively inexpensive Canon point-and-shoot. The results have been, well, pretty lame. I know enough to know that getting images as spectacular as Jeremy’s takes a lot of diving skill, years of experience, and good equipment, including specialized strobe lights (not to mention knowing how to use them). It also takes patience and a practiced eye. Jeremy has all of those, and I think you’ll love seeing the nearly two dozen photos we’ll be running in the next issue.
Tina Hay, editor
Entry filed under: College of Communications, The Penn Stater magazine, Undergraduate education. Tags: flabellina rubrolineata, Jeremy Cohen, nembrotha cristata nudibranch, threespot humbug, underwater photography, white-eyed moray eel.
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1. R Thomas Berner | December 9, 2010 at 10:40 am
Very cool. I learned many years when shooting at the Great Barrier Reef that without special lighting you get your best underwater shots at an aquarium. :-)
2. Suesan W. Taylor | December 14, 2010 at 1:20 am
Terrific photos! Thank you so much for this article.
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