Photography of the Ocean Floor* 



By A. S. Laughton 



National Institute of Oceanography 

 Surrey, England 



[With 9 plates] 



It was inevitable tliat, once the photographic method of recording 

 pictures had become established, its use as a means of reproducing 

 underwater scenes and the life of the sea should have been considered. 

 The first serious efforts to take underwater photographs were made 

 by Boutan in 1893, w^orking in tlie clear waters of the Mediterranean 

 off the coast of France. Although his only successful photographs 

 were made by a diver-operated camera, he nevertheless foresaw the 

 value of an automatic camera which could be lowered to the sea floor 

 in places inaccessible to a diver. His failure in this field w^as due to 

 the lack of suitable illumination and to the primitive nature of the 

 apparatus then available. 



Surprisingly enough, automatic underwater photography was not 

 followed up until nearly 50 years later, although diver-operated cam- 

 eras taking botli still and cine film had been extensively developed. 

 In 1940, M. Ewing, A. Vine, and J. L. Worzel [1] ^ successfully took 

 photographs of the sea floor with a fully automatic camera. Under 

 the stimulus of wartime needs, photography of the sea floor, especially 

 of wrecks, and of sea-floor conditions for the purpose of sound propa- 

 gation studies, became an established technique. After the war, it 

 was quickly realized that this was a technique tliat could be used to 

 investigate the gi-eat ocean depths and to observe the abyssal fauna 

 and geology in situ. Following the American lead, many laboratories 

 throughout the world have developed their own deep-sea cameras 

 and have used them for a great variety of purposes. 



CAMERA DESIGN 



Fortunately for underw^ater photography, the wavelength for which 

 the attenuation of litrht through water is a minimum lies in the middle 



1 Reprinted l).v permission from Endeavour, vol. 18, No. 72, October 1950. 



2 Numbers in braclsets refer to list of references at end of article. 



319 



