Drive about thirty minutes south from San Francisco along Highway 1 and you will come to the town of Moss Beach. When you get there, look for a small sign on the right that says "Marine Life Refuge". At the end of the road you will find Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, a place where you can leave city life behind and experience an ephemeral world that is only available to humans when the gravitational pull of the moon and sun create a low tide.
I first ventured out onto the rocky algae covered reef of the FMR in 2004. At the time, I had made a life changing decision to give up a career in biology and venture into the field of natural history filmmaking. Excluding the countless hours I had spent watching nature shows on TV, I had no formal film production training. What I did have was a new video camera, a wool cap, and a child-like fascination with exploring nature. Over the next year, I spent every available daylight low tide at the reserve figuring out how to capture the feeling of coming face-to-face with a hermit crab.
Filming in a marine environment presents a host of special challenges. Electronics and saltwater are not friends, but I had decided to make a film entirely within one foot above and below the water line. To do so I would have to get creative. For the majority of the underwater shots, I used a homemade aquascope made out of a black plastic tube that I cut to fit on the end of my camera’s lens. I glued a piece of clear Plexiglas on the other end, which allowed me to film in inches of water without the glare produced by the sun reflecting off the surface. Later I stepped up to a "splash bag", which is basically a glorified Ziploc bag with a clear lens on one end. The splash bag seals the camera inside and has the added advantage of protecting the camera when you slip on a spot of slick algae and slide down some jagged rocks into the ocean.
The second most useful piece of equipment I acquired for the film was a close-up filter, which is basically a magnifying glass that screws onto the lens. This allowed me to get the detailed shots of the tide pool inhabitants. I like the idea of filming animals from their own perspective, which in this case meant sitting or lying on the rocks to get the camera at the same level as the subject. This sounds easy enough, but when sitting on cold wet rocks, it doesn’t take long before the shivers start to make your hands (and thus your camera) shake.