Tampa Photography Blog

Waking up before sunrise is not my favorite way to start a day. Some people are “morning people” but I am not one of them.

But if you ask me to get up early, put on a wetsuit and tell me I get to take pictures first thing, that’s a totally different story. Waking up at any hour is worth it if the end product is cool photos.

I work for the University of Tampa often and one of their most popular publications is The Journal. It’s a wonderful magazine highlighting UT alumni and where their lives have taken them.

For the third time in the last year, I shot the cover of The Journal—this makes no difference to most people but I like the challenge. You have to shoot for a certain size photo as well as make sure one story-telling photo can draw people into the magazine as well as keep the cover aesthetically appealing.

This assignment had my husband and I up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday to meet UT marine biology students and their professors at the Tampa Bayside Marina. (My husband occasionally works as a freelance writer for UT as well—it’s rare we get to work together any more so this was a treat!) We were told that we might be in knee-deep water so wear something that could get wet. Little did we know, it was really waist-deep water—thank God for extra wetsuits!

The purpose of the morning for the researchers was to find and collect seahorses and pipefish. This is a lot harder than it might sound. Dwarf seahorses (to be specific) are about the size of a fingertip.  And there are so many amazing creatures in the sea; it’s sometimes hard to sift through the seaweed to find the tiny seahorse.

But with huge nets, these students scraped the ocean floor and found what they needed to complete the mission. They then photographed each creature (and measure it’s length) plus recorded all the data.

It was a really fun day and it made me thankful for my career, once again. How many people can say they got paid to throw on a wetsuit, spend time with their husband and shoot photos of seahorses on a Saturday morning?