Bell_Medusa	Blood_Star	Feather_star
	Cookie_Star	Cushion_Star	Dirona_albolineata
	diver	Rose_Anemone	Simnia_Snail
	Squid	Stars	Zoanthid_Anemone

Click on the thumbnails above to see a larger version of Gordon's images.

Although he didn’t become serious about underwater photography until 1998, Gordon Robinson earned his diving certification in July 1966. He made his first open water dive at Monastery Beach in Carmel on his seventeenth birthday with eighty-foot visibility and numerous schools of large rockfish. For two years Gordon dove this environment regularly and found that his certification day was not unusual. In 1968 he left the Bay Area and spent the next three years in the tropical Pacific getting experience in wreck diving, salvage and rescue. After returning to the Bay Area in 1972, he dove intermittently, and mostly tropical, for several years.

In 1988 Gordon returned to Monterey diving regularly and noticed things had changed. The good visibility days seemed rarer; the fish… fewer and smaller and a some of his favorite animals appeared to be gone all together. In 1968, he would visit friendly wolf eels--feeding and petting several of the Breakwater residents. In 1988 there were none. With fewer “big” animals and less spectacular visibility, Gordon started taking a closer look and began to notice the numerous and spectacular nudibranchs and other colorful invertebrates. Eventually he bought a Motor Marine camera so he could show friends the “neat stuff” in our own backyard. After a few lucky results he was hooked and bought a housed Nikon in 1999.

Excited by the images of the fabulous variety of invertebrates he was getting in Monterey, he looked deeper for new animals to shoot. In 2002, Gordon completed technical diving training so he could safely carry his camera past 150 feet. During the many training dives off Carmel he began to encounter a brand new, but somehow familiar world. Not carrying the camera until near the end of training, he encountered exotic sea stars, nudibranchs, sponges and snails he’d never seen before. But there were also old friends. Large numbers of big vermilion and China rockfish as well as huge numbers of more common varieties, and the wolf eels were there too. And the water was much “cleaner”. Suddenly it was like diving in the sixties again with eighty-foot visibility not uncommon. Though a little darker and a little farther than the kelp reaches, this turned out to be a photographer’s paradise – great “vis” and remarkable animals.

The images presented here represent the beginning of a new adventure in a place where the ocean is still pristine and the intertidal and deep water animals meet in the middle of a lush, vibrant ecology. Gordon’s goal is to spend the next few years trying to do photographic justice to this special place off our central coast.

Note: All images on these pages are copyright of the respective photographer.

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Last Updated August 10, 2003