Photography main

We’re NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Photo Engineering Shop.

We supply our photographers their everyday tools, but they don’t spend every day in normal situations. They tend to get themselves onto frozen mountaintops, a half-mile deep underwater, or into the subzero Arctic. So our greater challenge is to let them work there—where off-the-shelf gear will not do the job. We design and fabricate specialized equipment.

For example, we designed and built the Shark Tow Camera (STC) for summer deployment in the Marshall Islands, to study the feeding habits of gray reef sharks.

STC consisted of a 35mm still camera and a video camera encased in a custom housing that could be towed underwater. Sharks were lured to the camera, and a small television camera attached to the still camera’s viewfinder let us compose the photograph at the moment of attack. The work led to the cover of the January 1995 Geographic.

Photograph by Jonathan Blair

Over the years, we have modified or created many unusual pieces of hardware to bring light to the darkest depths of the ocean. We have modified Boeing 747 landing lights for a deep underwater array. We have hand-wired 22 old-fashioned number 50 flashbulbs into a glass underwater float. And we have created what we named Great Balls of Fire! or GBF. The GBF is constructed of a pair of 17-inch tempered-glass hemispheres. Inside are four high-powered flashtubes and 36 high-energy storage capacitors equaling more than 6,000 watt-seconds of light—far more strobe output than any other underwater source of light built.

For projects that take divers deeper than 150 feet, our crew has used or developed remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) for 35mm and video-camera systems (left). These vehicles have been used on the San Diego wreck, Suruga Bay, and Lusitania stories in the magazine. Video generated with them has been broadcast on National Geographic Television and has also been used in the motion picture The Abyss.

Our engineering is not confined to the oceans. We have built custom “smart-sensing” and remote-tripping equipment not available to the average photographer for many stories—from shuttle launches to tigers, prairie dogs to eagles, and dragonflies to tornadoes. We have also built remote articulated arms mounted with cameras and video cameras for underground exploration at Egyptian and Maya archaeological sites.

In future updates of the online magazine we’ll explore individual technical challenges and explain how we met them.