OCEAN BED AS A STAGE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19500, 8 June 1925, Page 10

OCEAN BED AS A STAGE.

CINEMATOGrRAPHING THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. Mr Ernest Williamson has turned an invention of his father’s for marine engineer mg into a device for cinomatographing the ocean bed. It is merely a steel tube ending in a water-tight steel chamber. As the tube is made up of sections, it can bo of any reasonable length. Inside of each section is a circle of hinges, so that the entire tube of the photographing apparatus, instead of being rigid, is flexible and collapsible, much as a Chinese lantern is. Most of Williamson’s pictures arc taken as a depth of from 25ft to 40ft; sometimes he goes 60ft below the surface. He says lie can go even deeper than that. It is merely a question of adding more sections to the tube and making the apparatus of heavier steel. . At first (says Mr Williamson, m the Pictorial Magazine) I thought I had to uso artificial light to make pictures under water. So I would lower a big reflector 12ft wide, and containing banks of powerful electric lights into the water above the scene that I wanted to photograph. I still use this sometimes. But I found that sunlight penetrates to the depths at which 1 usually work,'and it is better than artificial light. On a sunny day, looking through the glass windows of the submerged chambers we can see at least 500 ft; the camera will register objects more than 200 ft away, and will give good pictures of scenes 100 ft distant'from the chamber. Out in the open we unscrew the face plates of our helmets when we have to talk; but water is a good transmitter of sound, and we can communicate without removing them while on the ocean bed. If we wanted to get a lot of fish into the picture we would rap with some heavy metal object on the inside of the steel chamber. Within a few seconds we would see myriads of them coming from all directions. They are curious. Often when I am down in a diving suit fish will swim right up to me and look in through the glass in front of my helmet. I have seen dozens of snarks, but they never attacked us, because v.o watched for them, and did not give them a chance. Ordinarily a shark will circle round you at h distance and for some •me before he decides to attack. The water is so clear there that, as I have said, we could see several hundred feet away. If we saw a shark circling around one of our actors ire would send a native diver to divert his attention. I always had native divers on beard, and they are accustomed to sharks. One thing which we proved by our motion pictures of sharks is that they do not have to turn over to bite. As their eyes are set far apart, one on each side of the great fiat head, a stark often turns on its Milo in order to look at some object. But I have made many pictures of them biting oil huge chunks of the bait we lowered to attract them, and they did it without turning over.