Silent Symphony is a beautiful new underwater book that won the World Grand Prize at the Underwater Film Festival in Antibes for "Best Best book of Underwater Images."

Silent Symphony was written and photographed by Tony Wu & William Tan. Charlotte of Dive Global talks to Tony Wu about the realization of this book...

Please click on the images below for a larger view.

Charlotte: Can you tell us a little about yourself and how you got into underwater photography?

Tony: I’ve been in love with the sea ever since I can remember. I’ve almost always lived near the ocean, and spent a lot of time fishing, crabbing, swimming, going through tide pools, etc. When I was growing up, I watched every documentary on the oceans I came across, and devoured every book I found about marine life. So long before I was able to scuba dive, the sea was in my blood.

I’ve also always had a strong interest in visual art – drawing, painting, photography, etc. So in a way, underwater photography was a perfect blend of my interests. The first time I entered the ocean on scuba, I knew I wanted to capture images of the beautiful things I saw and share the wonders of the marine world with other people. It’s just something I had to do.

Getting started in underwater photography wasn’t easy, of course. First I had to learn photography, which entailed getting a beat up old Nikon F2A, and burning through hundreds of rolls of film just to master the basics. Then, when I got my first underwater camera system, I very quickly discovered that composing images underwater is a completely different challenge than getting nice images on land. I guess that’s a nice way of saying that I screwed up a lot!

Charlotte: How did you get the idea for the book?

Tony: Photos that William and I took started to get published by resorts, then magazines, newspapers and so forth. We were just having a lot of fun sharing our images, especially when we were able to convince other people to take up diving or to care about the ocean more.

At one point, while looking through some of our slides, we found ourselves with so many images “hidden” away in our respective filing cabinets that we joked about putting together a book so we could share our favorites.

It wasn’t until a couple of years after that conversation, sometime in 1998, that I actually started work on the story for Silent Symphony. Both William and I had written stories for magazines, and found that we really enjoyed communicating our thoughts and experiences. But, we both felt that articles were too short to communicate the full complexity and beauty of the ocean, so we started working on a more ambitious project to convey our experiences in the sea.

I went through a lot of drafts, and in the end, I realized that in order to make a book really worthwhile, we had to be unique, not just in images, but also with the story, presentation and message. There are a lot of coffee table books with nice images. I wanted ours to stand out by presenting a coherent story with a meaningful theme, different than anything anyone else had produced before. That’s when the idea of drawing an analogy between music and the oceans came to mind.

Charlotte: Can you elaborate on the relationship between the marine world and music that is the main theme of Silent Symphony?

Tony: It’s a simple analogy, but very effective.

A musical symphony is a complex work of art, given life by a coordinated orchestra comprising many instruments and musicians. The ocean world is silent to us, but like a symphony, is an intricate masterpiece of unique animals and environments that work in harmony with each other. Both a symphony and the oceans have a value greater than the sum of its parts.

Once we see the similarity, it’s also easy to understand that the ocean loses its integrity and splendor when a part of it is damaged, much like a symphony would fall apart if you took away the string instruments, for example.

The underlying message is that everything we do affects the oceans, from littering to oil spills, land reclamation to excessive use of fertilizers, over fishing to shark finning.

Charlotte: What is the most amazing diving experience you had when working on this book?

Tony: There were so many, it’s difficult to pick one. But if I had to choose, I’d say my encounter with a juvenile sperm whale.

I wasn’t actually scuba diving; I was on snorkel only. To make a long story short, a very curious 35-foot juvenile sperm whale approached our boat when we were cruising waters above a mid-pacific deep water trench. I got in, and the whale immediately approached, and started to check me out with sonar.

The clicks and clacks of the sonar started off innocently enough, but the words of the boat captain made the situation a bit nerve wracking. Before I went into the water, he said, “remember, if it turns on the sonar, it might think you’re food”.

So when the whale ‘turned up the volume’, so to speak, and approached very quickly while rapidly opening and closing its cavernous mouth filled with large, shiny white teeth, I was pretty sure I was history.

I ended up plastered on the whale’s bulbous forehead, with it gnawing one of my long fins. Whenever I tried to back away, the whale approached me again, and the current pushed me back into the whale. I pretty much accepted my fate, and decided to least get some decent images before anything happened to me.

After awhile, my heart rate settled to a cool 200 beats a minute or so, and I realized that maybe I wasn’t going to be eaten. As it turned out, the whale was just curious, and I ended up spending nearly two hours in the water with it…sort of playing ‘tag’ and ‘hide and seek’ with each other. Imagine having a 35-foot puppy dog follow you around in 9,000+ feet of open water…

Charlotte: How's it to work with William Tan?

Tony: William and I are great friends. Other than the fact that we’re both Chinese and love the ocean, we’re almost polar opposites – personality, likes/ dislike, sleeping hours, you name it. But that’s probably one of the reasons we work well together.

We met quite early on in our efforts to improve our underwater images, and we ended up sharing our experiences from trips with one another. That helped tremendously, as we were both able to learn from each other’s successes and failures. We’ve never actually gone on a trip together, so we’ve also been able to diversify the places we go and the risks we take viz. weather, water conditions, etc.

Our images and photo styles blend well together also. William tends to emphasize composition, form and color in his images, and I tend to lean toward capturing behavior and creating dramatic lighting effects.

We’re very lucky in my opinion. We came across a few photographers who aren’t so nice, so to speak, and we decided that there’s no point behaving that way. So we happily share experiences, and eagerly learn from others. It’s all about having fun, making friends and sharing, after all. As a result, we’ve been able to extend our cooperative working relationship with many other terrific photographers, and have made lots of friends around the world.
 
Charlotte: What equipment do you us and why!

Tony: Underwater, we use mostly Nikon cameras. Both of us have Nikon F90x cameras, which have since been surpassed by newer models. But we’ve found that we only really need the basic functions – good lenses, control over shutter speed and aperature. So for the time being, we’re sticking with the old equipment. Similarly, we stick with basic, high quality lenses: Nikon 16 mm, 20 mm, 60 mm, 105 mm primarily, a few others from time to time. We also have Nikonos cameras, for specific situations when SLRs are not the best tool to use.

We use Japanese housings and strobes from Nexus and Sea & Sea. Both companies have been very good to us, and their equipment is second to none. We also exclusively use Fuji film. We tried others before, but prefer the consistency, saturation and quality of Fuji.

Charlotte: How do you deal with being underwater for hours on end?

Tony: Ha! That’s easy, there’s no place I’d rather be. I stay so long underwater, people on dive trips joke about never seeing me dry. The only slightly troublesome aspect of being underwater for a long time is that I tend to get hypothermia. So on dive trips, there’s always a thermos of hot tea/ hot chocolate ready to revive me!

Charlotte: What about the locations of where the images were taken?

Tony: A lot of the images were taken in southeast Asia – Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand – simply because those places are close to where we live and are filled with magnificent marine life. But we traveled to other destinations like Australia, Japan, Colombia and the Maldives for specific images to fill in the storyline of Silent Symphony.

We each have our favorite destinations, Derawan for me, and Manado for William (both in Indonesia). We’ve known the operators in these places for ages, and the resorts are like second homes for us.

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