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»	Introduction
	The Nikonos discovery
	The first lesson
	The second lesson
	The third lesson
	The command dials
	The lenses
	More lenses
	DOF
	The exposure metering system
	Cancun
	More of Cancun
	Nikon School
	Conclusions

Underwater photography is as fascinating or more than land or aerial photography.  The 'painting with light' concept is by far more evident underwater than above the surface. Besides, to enter into a submerged new world, hidden, increases emotions with that of discovery. Although it may look at first as something very complicated, I will attempt here to convey it is not that difficult and very exciting.
 

The author and his son in the sunny beaches of Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico, coming back from a brief snorkeling dive, quite a few years ago.

My father, him being an expert swimmer, taught me maybe when I was 5 years old, and it seemed already too late; after all, it had been 5 long years since I had abandoned the amphibian life of a manatee.

He took us to swim almost every weekend. During my early adolescence to many swimming pools but I do remember well "Hot Eye"; public sulfurous thermal pools in the open, on the road between Monterrey and Saltillo. With persistent frequency so full with slime and weeds that not much imagination was needed to see (and feel) strange 'things' in the water.

Being the elder of my brothers and sisters, the firstborn, I could not afford the luxury of showing myself scared. So by necessity I had learned to pretend to be scareless to both water and its creatures. And suddenly a good day, after so much pretending, the anguish was gone and I began to enjoy enormously.
 

For my beloved wife, the beach, the sea, is the only true good resting place. So the ocean had always attracted us plenty, from the barren coast of New Jersey and the rocky beaches of California with its sea wolfs, to those of Manzanillo, filled with seal fish; Cancun, Cozumel, Belize, Bahamas, Hawaii, Cayman Islands and Jamaica, with their extraordinary reefs, clear turquoise blue waters and over 2,000 varieties of tropical fish. As a family we had been very lucky, at the University of Pennsylvania, true avant-garde limbo, we introduced our daughter Tatiana into the gym swimming pool when she was 40 days old and our son Juan Ramon was a consummated diver at the tender age of two. We visited Cancun and Cozumel with regularity, even before they became world known tourism destinations. So the family began to dive together since our own creatures were babies.