Former cop captures images under the sea


Former cop captures images under the sea

Tom Haight photographed this sea turtle during a night dive in Palau in 1998.

About Tom Haight

Home state: New Jersey

Time as a cop: After spending four years as a Navy hospital corpsman, Haight worked for the San Clemente Police Department. "It was really fun being able to help people. ... I worked a beach unit... and if the surf got big, we'd end up parking the Jeep on the pier and making rescues all day long," he said. A back injury forced Haight to retire from police work in 1989.

Family: Haight and his wife of four years, Camilla, were both widowed before they married. Each has three children from their previous marriages, and they have eight grandchildren.

Along the walls in Tom Haight's Capistrano Beach home are photographs from under the sea – a small orange fish sucked into an anemone, a pygmy seahorse no bigger than a thumbnail, a manatee spiraling through turquoise water.

Haight, 65, retired from his job as a policeman about 20 years ago, and turned his underwater photography hobby into a business.

He's photographed the rare megamouth shark, an animal that has only been spotted around 50 times, and his work has been published in National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Discovery Channel Books and the Orange County Register.

On land, Haight gives slideshow presentations of his pictures at schools in San Clemente, and makes his images available pro bono to Doheny State Beach.

Q. How did you first get started with underwater photography?

A. I was the first one in my family to dive. I read a book that was written by Jacques Cousteau, "The Silent World," and it was just fascinating. ... Someone I knew had an underwater camera, and he lent it to me... So I borrowed it and went out and shot some photos, and I went, "That is cool, I like that. This is a lot of fun."

It's almost like spear fishing, but you're not hurting the fish. Sometimes you have to stalk them to try to get the photograph. You have to be very patient and hunt them. Sometimes you sit still and wait four or five minutes just to get one photograph of a particular fish. Some of them are very, very shy. They'll hide, and you have to understand their habitat, and their habits, and their feeding, if you want to photograph them, so it's quite a challenge.

Q. How close do you usually get to marine life that you're shooting?

A. They're usually touching the end of the dome on my housing (the watertight protective case around a camera). There's a photo up here of a poisonous lionfish. His lateral fins were actually just touching the end of the dome of the housing.

Q. What animals do you photograph in Orange County?

A. I photograph anything I can find. Cowrie shells – at nighttime you go out, and you find the shells, and they actually crawl across the reef. Sand dollars; they stand up on end underwater. They have little hairs on the bottom of their body, silica, so they'll feed on the nutrients that are coming by in the water.

Q. What are some of the special challenges that underwater photography presents?

A. Gee, in the old days, if one out of 36 photos came out underwater, we thought it was a good day.... If there's a lot of stuff floating in the water, it's a real challenge to try to get a photograph because we've got all these little dots that will show up in the pictures. ... You're limited in how much time you have. ... If you go to 100 feet, you can stay for maybe 20 minutes. If you stay too long, you're going to have to make safety stops on the way up.

Q. What was your most memorable photo shoot?

A. The megamouth shark.

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