2014 Image of the Year

2014 Image of the Year

Congratulations to Andreas Hagberg, whose photo was chosen for the 2014 GUE Image of the Year!

About the site:
The picture was taken in the entrance to a spring cave called Little Devil’s Spring located in the Ginnie Springs park in High Springs, Florida. The cave itself is currently blocked by natural debris, but from a small opening there is still crystal clear spring water flowing year round. Before the entrance was blocked the cave was explored and mapped by Woody Jasper, Wes Skiles and Roberta Swicegood using so called “no-mount” configuration, where a diver needs to push tanks in front of him/her to fit through the cave.

About the photo:
Shot on a regular sunny morning in Florida, I was joined by Doug Mudry and Kyle Harmon and we went out to try to capture some silhouette shots close to the surface. It turned out we were a bit early for what I would consider an “ideal” setting where I would have been able to capture the sun in a more central spot over the cavern entrance, but I think we were all still pleased with the result here. The photo was taken with a Nikon D300 with the very popular Tokina 10-17mm lens in a Seacam housing.

About the photographer:
Andreas has been diving since 1993 and took the first underwater pictures a couple of years later during an “Advanced Open Water” class, using a Motor Marine II camera. Andreas continued taking pictures on land with a film-SLR and briefly enjoyed the art of black&white film developing. After that it took many years until a camera was purchased for usage under water. After living in Florida’s cave country for a number of years it became all too obvious that a more light-sensitive camera was needed to capture the pitch-black environments often found in these underground rivers, and it was again time to upgrade to an SLR, this time a digital one. When not focusing on photography, Andreas tries to find a good balance between cave exploration, rebreather-building and software development.