Underwater photo at Hòn Kim Quy

Eighteen metres. Sixty minutes. Camera on a short lanyard. Three target subjects: the resident lionfish off the wall, the sea fan colony at the south end of the reef, and one wide shot of the reef cut from below if the light at twelve metres held.

Camera protocol agreed with myself before the dive: every time I lift the camera, I check my SPG before I press the shutter. The shutter is the last action, not the first. The SPG check is the cost of being allowed to take the picture.

The descent was easy. The lionfish was where it always is. I framed it at the second hover, took three shots, checked my SPG, found one hundred and seventy bar, kept going.

The sea fan colony was the harder shot. I had to drop a metre to get the right angle. I dropped a metre. I held the angle. I framed. I took the shot. I forgot to check the SPG before the shutter on the second frame. I forgot it again on the third.

I did not notice that I had forgotten. I noticed when I lifted the camera for the fourth shot and my own protocol surfaced as a small alarm in the back of my head: the SPG, the SPG, you have not looked. I pulled the camera down. I checked. I had one hundred and forty bar. Nothing was wrong. The dive was on schedule. I had just stopped seeing the dive.

I caught myself a second time at minute forty-five, on the wide reef cut. The light was working. I had three or four breaths to take the shot before a school of fusiliers I had been tracking moved out of frame. I lifted the camera, framed, and felt the same small alarm before I pressed the shutter. This time the alarm arrived earlier. I lowered the camera, checked, took the shot. The fusiliers were still in frame. The picture was fine.

The slip is not the missed SPG checks. The slip is the way the camera changed the dive.

When I had the camera in my hand, my dive shrank to the size of the frame. I stopped being a diver looking at a reef. I became a viewfinder looking at a subject. The SPG, the buddy, the depth, the time, the current, all of these things slid out of my peripheral vision because the viewfinder ate it.

Mr. Huy's warning, before my first dive with a camera, was almost word for word the thing I felt happening at the sea fan: do not let the camera become the dive. I had heard the warning. I had agreed with the warning. I had built a protocol explicitly designed to keep the dive bigger than the camera. The protocol was the SPG-before-shutter rule. I had broken the rule twice in a row at minute twenty-eight without noticing, and the only reason I noticed at all was that my own alarm caught up to me one shot late.

The slip is that the rule did not save me. The alarm did. The rule and the alarm are not the same thing. The rule is supposed to keep the alarm from ever needing to fire. The alarm firing is the warning that the rule is being treated as wallpaper.

The camera taught me what a focused exit from the dive looks like. It is not panic. It is not narcosis. It is not a current pushing you off the reef. It is a small object in your hand that makes the rest of the dive look like background.

The translation to a position on a screen is exact. The position is the lionfish. The screen is the camera. Everything outside the position is the reef I am supposed to still be diving.

I am keeping the SPG-before-shutter rule. I am also writing a new rule under it. Once per dive, I am putting the camera away for five minutes and just diving. If the dive does not survive five minutes without the camera, the dive was not a dive. It was a photo session in scuba equipment.