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Before you begin reading this take a deep breath and hold it.

Humans have lost their aquatic heritage. To most, the ocean is a distant galaxy—a cold and dangerous shadow world haunted by gliding, toothy predators; a forgotten place of primordial fear.

Scott Campbell is a biological anachronism. Or maybe a glimpse of the future. He is a sea monkey—living, breath-holding proof that, from an evolutionary perspective, the human race has scarcely shaken itself dry; that the ocean was once our home.

Armed with a camera, Campbell has, in a way, reclaimed our place in the sea by reminding us of what we left behind. His ethereal, black-and-white images are startling, unforgettable glimpses back into our collective origins. They capture the divine grace and mystery of the deep and its inhabitants from a uniquely integrated perspective. Campbell’s photos are more than just detached observations through a lens. Somehow they manage to imply union, or rather, a reunion. They evoke a fundamental sense of belonging.

Still holding your breath? If so, you’ve probably already experienced those first, unpleasant pangs of air hunger. Most of us start getting the signal for air after about 30 seconds. A world-class freediver, Campbell can hold his breath over seven minutes. He can dive to depths of 200 feet. That’s right. He can listen to the entire second movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony without taking a breath. He can reach depths equivalent to a 20-story building unaided and unencumbered by the clunky, alien technology of SCUBA. Campbell is wholly integrated into the ocean and his photos reflect it.

A member of the US National Freediving Team from 1998 until his retirement last year, Campbell held the US record in static apnea, where the freediver holds his breath for as long as possible while floating at the surface. At one point he was second in the world.

International team freediving competitions are broken into two primary events: static apnea and constant weight. Constant weight is the freediving discipline many people are familiar with, where freedivers descend as deep as they can using only their fins for power. “The ‘constant’ refers to your weight [belt],” Campbell says. “You have to bring it back up.”

Despite the fact that Campbell’s strength is static apnea (his US record time of six minutes and 47 seconds stood for years, and his personal best is seven minutes, 35 seconds), he was very respectable in the constant weight division as well.

“In depth I was doing about 200 feet. When I went to [the 1998 World Championships in] Sardinia that was about the max depth. Now, of course, they’re diving much deeper. The world record is well into the 300’s I think.”

Strangely enough, Campbell came to the sport somewhat late in life. In his mid-twenties, he borrowed a beat-up wetsuit, went freediving off Lover’s Point, and came away astonished by the experience. While attending San Jose State, his roommate’s father introduced Campbell to abalone diving and from there he became interested in spearfishing. This orderly progression eventually led him to his first true passion, bluewater hunting.

“About 15 years ago or so I started going down to San Diego, Guadalupe and Cortez Bank to shoot yellowtail [tuna]. I wouldn’t go that deep…40, 50, sometimes 60 feet or more,” Campbell says. “Then in 1997, I went to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean and ran into Umberto Pelizzari, the world champion freediver from Italy who, at the time, had held the record for a long time.”

They hit it off, and Campbell spent the week training with Pelizzari and the Italian freediving team. “I was pretty out of shape,” Campbell says, “but it was fun just learning from them.”

The following year, Campbell caught wind of try-outs for a newly founded US national freediving team in San Diego. Building on his training with Pelizzari, Campbell made the team and began competing against the best freedivers in the world on some of the most beautiful coasts in the world.

So can anyone get into freediving or do you need to have some kind of abnormal, throwback sea-mammal physique?

“I think there’s a physiological component to it, but it’s a lot more about fitness, training and conditioning,” Campbell says. “Anybody, even people who don’t have the classic mesomorph [musclebound] or ectomorph [skinny] physique can reach some really respectable depths and times.”

“There’s also an aerobic component to it, a training component—CO2 tolerance training. The signal for us to breathe is not that we’re low on oxygen, it’s that we’re getting high on levels of CO2 in our system. There’s certain mental and physical training you can do to tolerate higher levels of CO2.”

Plus, in deep diving, there are also pressure components to consider. Every 30 feet below the surface of the water adds an additional “atmosphere” of pressure on the body, and this pressure halves the volume of air in your lungs at each atmosphere. So when you take a breath and go down two, three, four, five atmospheres, the volume of air in your lungs gets smaller and smaller. By the time you’ve reached 150-200 feet, it’s compacted down to the size of a tightly clenched fist. Considering that freedivers must reserve enough air to maintain equilibrium in their ears and sinuses, this leaves very little room for error.

As you may imagine, freediving can be immensely dangerous, and deaths from unaccompanied shallow water blackouts do happen, most recently with legendary Santa Cruz surfer Jay Moriarty in 2001. Yet it’s the dangerous “No Limits” category of freediving, where the diver descends feet-first on a weighted sled which runs along a cable and then ascends with the aid of a balloon inflated from an air tank, that attracts the most media attention.

In 2002, 28-year-old Audre Mestre, who Campbell knew personally, died while attempting to break the world record of 528 feet. Campbell feels the sled and balloon take something from the purity of freediving, but admits that all forms of freediving are inherently hazardous.

“Personally, I’ve never had a complete blackout,” he says. “I’ve samba’d— which is kind of a loss of motor control—but I haven’t really officially blacked out. Training has made me realize my limits and I’m more in touch with those signals telling me to take care of myself.”

Having recently retired from the national team, Campbell is now devoting more of his time to photography.

“Up until a few years ago, I did photography and I did my freediving, but I didn’t mix the two,” Campbell says. “I always loved black and white photography. There’s only one or two photographers I like who use it and there’s no one out there who does it primarily freediving.”

The result is an astonishing and moving body of underwater work that Campbell has shot among wrecks in North Carolina, below oil platforms in Louisiana, off the coast of Mexico and, of course, in our own Monterey County waters. But Campbell’s most remarkable images have been captured in “blue water,” meaning out in open-ocean.

“Diving in blue water is a whole different animal,” Campbell says. “When you’re diving on reefs you’ve got a point of reference underwater, you feel safe, you’ve got something you can swim to. When you’re in blue water you are swimming in a great empty void, you don’t have anything to connect with while you’re in the water. It can be nerve wracking—and you consume oxygen faster when you’re anxious.”

In fact, Campbell says, bluewater diving is primarily an exercise in fear management.

“Being part of the food chain, which you are in blue water, brings anxiety,” Campbell says. “Being away from any visible reference or solid land builds anxiety. And, of course, the physical exertion required to dive 80, 100, 200 feet on one breath doesn’t help much either.”

Campbell’s most indelible images are intimate portraits of very large animals: whales, sharks, billfish, rays, tuna and schools of jacks. He describes the experience of diving with large animals as a constant struggle between anxiety and calmness. Freediving requires its devotees to attain a profoundly calm state of being in a tremendously adverse environment. Yet introduce a 14-foot tiger shark into the monastery and even the most assiduous of monks would want to take a deep breath. For his own safety, Campbell has learned to exude the calm, slow, gentle aura of a sunfish underwater.

“These animals sense that anxiety,” Campbell says. “They feel what you put out there, and if you’re panicky they’ll tend to stay away. You have to train yourself to be OK with sharks, whales and manta rays. They’ll read that.”

It’s a state of being that Campbell has perfected. But you can’t dive with large animals if you can’t find them, and open-ocean is a pretty big place. Subsequently, Campbell will take a boat out to buoys called Fish Aggregate Devices (FADS) and wait around to see what shows up. On one memorable day last year in Hawaii, his patience paid off in a big way. A very big way.

“We were out near this FAD in Hawaii when we saw the whales,” he recalls. “We looked over the side of the boat and there they were, so we jumped in and they stayed right with us for a good 45 minutes to an hour.

“I think the non-threatening diving skills that I have made them stay with us. When most people see whales they swim right towards them and the whales swim away. Just like any fish, advancing on an unknown is predator/prey behavior. I was able to parallel them, to dive away from them and make them more curious with my slow-moving, non-threatening gestures. The whales slowly came to feel safe around me. They would dive down and I wouldn’t see them for awhile and then all of a sudden both of them were coming straight at me, and that happened time after time after time. Then they would split up and sort of keep their distance. Toward the end I was having to swim away from them so I wouldn’t have contact with them. It got to that level of trust between us.”

Sharks are a slightly different story. Campbell has dived with blues, oceanic whitetips, browns, bronze whalers, bulls, Galapagos sharks, hammerheads and more, but his most memorable experiences have been with tigers, makos and great whites.

“Those three sharks are a little sketchy. Tigers scare me. When you’re around a 14-foot Tiger shark you get a little nervous, especially when all you have is a little Nikonos V camera in your hands and he’s coming straight at you. Makos and white sharks are just really unpredictable. They’re so big and you just can’t be certain what’s really on their mind.”

And when Campbell says he’s dived with a great white shark he doesn’t mean he’s floated safely in a cage while one slid silently by. No, he means he swam in open water with a great white shark.

“We were abalone diving up north near Año Nuevo when a white shark came around us years ago. That was something.” Campbell concedes that the presence of great white sharks is nearly guaranteed if you spend enough time in our local waters. “I was diving up in Marin last Friday and I know they were there.”

“Sharks are beautiful creatures, but any animal over ten feet is bound to get you a little nervous. Billfish, like big blue marlin and swordfish, can be a little overwhelming as well.”

Finding subjects to photograph in the ocean requires a great deal of luck, but without excellent water clarity or “visibility,” they won’t translate well on black-and-white film anyway. Experts, as they say, make their own luck, and Campbell is no different. He has a number of favorite destinations that have proven to be consistently rich in fauna and visibility.

The Revillagigedo Archipelago consists of four volcanic islands located about 370 miles west of the Mexican State of Colima, Mexico. World famous for the abundance of apex predators like hammerhead sharks, giant pacific mantas, and yellowfin tuna, Revillagigedo was declared a Biosphere Reserve in 1994 when commercial fishing threatened a number of species. While on a fish-counting expedition in Revillagigedo, Campbell put his speargun aside and picked up his camera. To date he’s made five trips to Revillagigedo, the most recent just two years ago.

“A lot of my best shots were taken around this one boiler rock in Revillagigedo. It is a great place,” Campbell says.

Louisiana oilrigs are another favorite destination. Surprisingly, Campbell says, over time these environmental blights transform into giant vertical reefs which actually contribute to certain species’ survival.

“One of things I’m advocating is not decommissioning these oil rigs, because they hold so much life. One of the things that bugs me is these ecologists who believe that they shouldn’t be there and that when they stop producing oil they should be torn out down to the bottom when they hold a ton of life and a lot of reproductive space for life.”

Other dive destinations that have proven to be photographically lucrative are sunken shipwrecks off the coast of North Carolina, the reefs and blue water of Hawaii, and the waters off Monterey, although Campbell admits he hasn’t yet really begun to explore the photographic possibilities in his backyard.

“I usually go out to Chase Reef [inside Point Piños], but I haven’t shot as much as I’d like around here. It’s not as clear as often as, say, Hawaii, but I’ve seen 90 feet of visibility,” he says. “It gets good and there’s no place like it in the world.”

When Campbell isn’t traveling and diving, he’s a highly successful commercial photographer who shoots more conventional subjects. Weddings even.

But will he do underwater weddings?

“Only if the bride and groom can perform the ceremony on one breath,” he says with a smile.

Scott Campbell’s work is on display at Passionfish, 701 Lighthouse Ave., Pacific Grove. For more information about Scott Campbell’s work visit www.on1breath.com or call

372-1455 for an appointment

to visit his studio.Armed with a camera, Campbell has, in a way, reclaimed our place in the sea by reminding us of what we left behind. His ethereal, black-and-white images are startling, unforgettable glimpses back into our collective origins. They capture the divine grace and mystery of the deep and its inhabitants from a uniquely integrated perspective. Campbell’s photos are more than just detached observations through a lens. Somehow they manage to imply union, or rather, a reunion. They evoke a fundamental sense of belonging.

Still holding your breath? If so, you’ve probably already experienced those first, unpleasant pangs of air hunger. Most of us start getting the signal for air after about 30 seconds. A world-class freediver, Campbell can hold his breath over seven minutes. He can dive to depths of 200 feet. That’s right. He can listen to the entire second movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony without taking a breath. He can reach depths equivalent to a 20-story building unaided and unencumbered by the clunky, alien technology of SCUBA. Campbell is wholly integrated into the ocean and his photos reflect it.

A member of the US National Freediving Team from 1998 until his retirement last year, Campbell held the US record in static apnea, where the freediver holds his breath for as long as possible while floating at the surface. At one point he was second in the world.

International team freediving competitions are broken into two primary events: static apnea and constant weight. Constant weight is the freediving discipline many people are familiar with, where freedivers descend as deep as they can using only their fins for power. “The ‘constant’ refers to your weight [belt],” Campbell says. “You have to bring it back up.”

Despite the fact that Campbell’s strength is static apnea (his US record time of six minutes and 47 seconds stood for years, and his personal best is seven minutes, 35 seconds), he was very respectable in the constant weight division as well.

“In depth I was doing about 200 feet. When I went to [the 1998 World Championships in] Sardinia that was about the max depth. Now, of course, they’re diving much deeper. The world record is well into the 300’s I think.”

Strangely enough, Campbell came to the sport somewhat late in life. In his mid-twenties, he borrowed a beat-up wetsuit, went freediving off Lover’s Point, and came away astonished by the experience. While attending San Jose State, his roommate’s father introduced Campbell to abalone diving and from there he became interested in spearfishing. This orderly progression eventually led him to his first true passion, bluewater hunting.

“About 15 years ago or so I started going down to San Diego, Guadalupe and Cortez Bank to shoot yellowtail [tuna]. I wouldn’t go that deep…40, 50, sometimes 60 feet or more,” Campbell says. “Then in 1997, I went to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean and ran into Umberto Pelizzari, the world champion freediver from Italy who, at the time, had held the record for a long time.”

They hit it off, and Campbell spent the week training with Pelizzari and the Italian freediving team. “I was pretty out of shape,” Campbell says, “but it was fun just learning from them.”

The following year, Campbell caught wind of try-outs for a newly founded US national freediving team in San Diego. Building on his training with Pelizzari, Campbell made the team and began competing against the best freedivers in the world on some of the most beautiful coasts in the world.

So can anyone get into freediving or do you need to have some kind of abnormal, throwback sea-mammal physique?

“I think there’s a physiological component to it, but it’s a lot more about fitness, training and conditioning,” Campbell says. “Anybody, even people who don’t have the classic mesomorph [musclebound] or ectomorph [skinny] physique can reach some really respectable depths and times.”

“There’s also an aerobic component to it, a training component—CO2 tolerance training. The signal for us to breathe is not that we’re low on oxygen, it’s that we’re getting high on levels of CO2 in our system. There’s certain mental and physical training you can do to tolerate higher levels of CO2.”

Plus, in deep diving, there are also pressure components to consider. Every 30 feet below the surface of the water adds an additional “atmosphere” of pressure on the body, and this pressure halves the volume of air in your lungs at each atmosphere. So when you take a breath and go down two, three, four, five atmospheres, the volume of air in your lungs gets smaller and smaller. By the time you’ve reached 150-200 feet, it’s compacted down to the size of a tightly clenched fist. Considering that freedivers must reserve enough air to maintain equilibrium in their ears and sinuses, this leaves very little room for error.

As you may imagine, freediving can be immensely dangerous, and deaths from unaccompanied shallow water blackouts do happen, most recently with legendary Santa Cruz surfer Jay Moriarty in 2001. Yet it’s the dangerous “No Limits” category of freediving, where the diver descends feet-first on a weighted sled which runs along a cable and then ascends with the aid of a balloon inflated from an air tank, that attracts the most media attention.

In 2002, 28-year-old Audre Mestre, who Campbell knew personally, died while attempting to break the world record of 528 feet. Campbell feels the sled and balloon take something from the purity of freediving, but admits that all forms of freediving are inherently hazardous.

“Personally, I’ve never had a complete blackout,” he says. “I’ve samba’d— which is kind of a loss of motor control—but I haven’t really officially blacked out. Training has made me realize my limits and I’m more in touch with those signals telling me to take care of myself.”

Having recently retired from the national team, Campbell is now devoting more of his time to photography.

“Up until a few years ago, I did photography and I did my freediving, but I didn’t mix the two,” Campbell says. “I always loved black and white photography. There’s only one or two photographers I like who use it and there’s no one out there who does it primarily freediving.”

The result is an astonishing and moving body of underwater work that Campbell has shot among wrecks in North Carolina, below oil platforms in Louisiana, off the coast of Mexico and, of course, in our own Monterey County waters. But Campbell’s most remarkable images have been captured in “blue water,” meaning out in open-ocean.

“Diving in blue water is a whole different animal,” Campbell says. “When you’re diving on reefs you’ve got a point of reference underwater, you feel safe, you’ve got something you can swim to. When you’re in blue water you are swimming in a great empty void, you don’t have anything to connect with while you’re in the water. It can be nerve wracking—and you consume oxygen faster when you’re anxious.”

In fact, Campbell says, bluewater diving is primarily an exercise in fear management.

“Being part of the food chain, which you are in blue water, brings anxiety,” Campbell says. “Being away from any visible reference or solid land builds anxiety. And, of course, the physical exertion required to dive 80, 100, 200 feet on one breath doesn’t help much either.”

Campbell’s most indelible images are intimate portraits of very large animals: whales, sharks, billfish, rays, tuna and schools of jacks. He describes the experience of diving with large animals as a constant struggle between anxiety and calmness. Freediving requires its devotees to attain a profoundly calm state of being in a tremendously adverse environment. Yet introduce a 14-foot tiger shark into the monastery and even the most assiduous of monks would want to take a deep breath. For his own safety, Campbell has learned to exude the calm, slow, gentle aura of a sunfish underwater.

“These animals sense that anxiety,” Campbell says. “They feel what you put out there, and if you’re panicky they’ll tend to stay away. You have to train yourself to be OK with sharks, whales and manta rays. They’ll read that.”

It’s a state of being that Campbell has perfected. But you can’t dive with large animals if you can’t find them, and open-ocean is a pretty big place. Subsequently, Campbell will take a boat out to buoys called Fish Aggregate Devices (FADS) and wait around to see what shows up. On one memorable day last year in Hawaii, his patience paid off in a big way. A very big way.

“We were out near this FAD in Hawaii when we saw the whales,” he recalls. “We looked over the side of the boat and there they were, so we jumped in and they stayed right with us for a good 45 minutes to an hour.

“I think the non-threatening diving skills that I have made them stay with us. When most people see whales they swim right towards them and the whales swim away. Just like any fish, advancing on an unknown is predator/prey behavior. I was able to parallel them, to dive away from them and make them more curious with my slow-moving, non-threatening gestures. The whales slowly came to feel safe around me. They would dive down and I wouldn’t see them for awhile and then all of a sudden both of them were coming straight at me, and that happened time after time after time. Then they would split up and sort of keep their distance. Toward the end I was having to swim away from them so I wouldn’t have contact with them. It got to that level of trust between us.”

Sharks are a slightly different story. Campbell has dived with blues, oceanic whitetips, browns, bronze whalers, bulls, Galapagos sharks, hammerheads and more, but his most memorable experiences have been with tigers, makos and great whites.

“Those three sharks are a little sketchy. Tigers scare me. When you’re around a 14-foot Tiger shark you get a little nervous, especially when all you have is a little Nikonos V camera in your hands and he’s coming straight at you. Makos and white sharks are just really unpredictable. They’re so big and you just can’t be certain what’s really on their mind.”

And when Campbell says he’s dived with a great white shark he doesn’t mean he’s floated safely in a cage while one slid silently by. No, he means he swam in open water with a great white shark.

“We were abalone diving up north near Año Nuevo when a white shark came around us years ago. That was something.” Campbell concedes that the presence of great white sharks is nearly guaranteed if you spend enough time in our local waters. “I was diving up in Marin last Friday and I know they were there.”

“Sharks are beautiful creatures, but any animal over ten feet is bound to get you a little nervous. Billfish, like big blue marlin and swordfish, can be a little overwhelming as well.”

Finding subjects to photograph in the ocean requires a great deal of luck, but without excellent water clarity or “visibility,” they won’t translate well on black-and-white film anyway. Experts, as they say, make their own luck, and Campbell is no different. He has a number of favorite destinations that have proven to be consistently rich in fauna and visibility.

The Revillagigedo Archipelago consists of four volcanic islands located about 370 miles west of the Mexican State of Colima, Mexico. World famous for the abundance of apex predators like hammerhead sharks, giant pacific mantas, and yellowfin tuna, Revillagigedo was declared a Biosphere Reserve in 1994 when commercial fishing threatened a number of species. While on a fish-counting expedition in Revillagigedo, Campbell put his speargun aside and picked up his camera. To date he’s made five trips to Revillagigedo, the most recent just two years ago.

“A lot of my best shots were taken around this one boiler rock in Revillagigedo. It is a great place,” Campbell says.

Louisiana oilrigs are another favorite destination. Surprisingly, Campbell says, over time these environmental blights transform into giant vertical reefs which actually contribute to certain species’ survival.

“One of things I’m advocating is not decommissioning these oil rigs, because they hold so much life. One of the things that bugs me is these ecologists who believe that they shouldn’t be there and that when they stop producing oil they should be torn out down to the bottom when they hold a ton of life and a lot of reproductive space for life.”

Other dive destinations that have proven to be photographically lucrative are sunken shipwrecks off the coast of North Carolina, the reefs and blue water of Hawaii, and the waters off Monterey, although Campbell admits he hasn’t yet really begun to explore the photographic possibilities in his backyard.

“I usually go out to Chase Reef [inside Point Piños], but I haven’t shot as much as I’d like around here. It’s not as clear as often as, say, Hawaii, but I’ve seen 90 feet of visibility,” he says. “It gets good and there’s no place like it in the world.”

When Campbell isn’t traveling and diving, he’s a highly successful commercial photographer who shoots more conventional subjects. Weddings even.

But will he do underwater weddings?

“Only if the bride and groom can perform the ceremony on one breath,” he says with a smile.

Scott Campbell’s work is on display at Passionfish, 701 Lighthouse Ave., Pacific Grove. For more information about Scott Campbell’s work visit www.on1breath.com or call 372-1455 for an appointment to visit his studio.