Page 13 - 2017 Year In Review

Coles Phinizy

Sharing an interest in aquatics and journalism Peter Stackpole and Coles Phinizy were more than just colleagues at Life Magazine.
They lived in the same neighborhood and shared ideas about underwater that would lead Coles to make his great contribution
to the field of underwater photography in his own basement workshop- the split-shot lens.

When Coles was 11 years old, his family moved from Georgia to Ventnor, New
Jersey where he discovered the Atlantic Ocean and a love of swimming. He worked
as a beach lifeguard and swam on the team at Harvard. He aspired to be a career
journalist and was editor of the Harvard Lampoon before graduating and enlisting
in the army. He had hoped to see action before the war ended, but was kept stateside
to write and edit chemical warfare manuals instead. After the war he landed a job
at Life and in 1954, he became one of the original staff writers for Sports Illustrated,
the first US magazine devoted to covering the world of sport.

He was a great writer, but when he started covering swimming events in 1956
he recognized the limitations of photography. From above the water the finest
swimmers in the world looked like a gasping, struggling, bedraggled and inefficient
lot.

“A photographer above water can no more convey the essence of swimming action
than da Vinci could have caught the Mona Lisa’s smile if he had been standing
behind her. When I first tried using an underwater camera for competitive
swimming it was not - as the trite phrase goes- ‘to get a new angle,’ but quite
simply to get the truth.”

Then, he thought it would be interesting and maybe even profitable, to develop a
split-image camera that would simultaneously capture the image of a swimmer both
above and below the water. The challenge of capturing swimming through a split image would consume Coles Phinizy for the
next dozen years.

The most basic problem was to design a camera that would eliminate the
surface tension of the water against the lens of a traditional underwater
camera. Using a traditional underwater camera created a wide band of
distortion between the aerial and underwater image. There is also less
light underwater, so the exposures of the above and below water scenes
are also different.

Phinizy solved the first problem by creating a lens port seven inches
in front of the camera lens. This made a thin dividing line. By devising
an underwater housing for his light meter and after experimenting
with filters and strobe lights to equalize the color balance, he solved
the second problem. What remained was the problem of distortion, as
objects underwater appear 1/3rd larger and closer than objects in air.

With the help of scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory, he
developed a diopter dome to replace the flat window that was seven
inches from the camera lens. This diopter reduced the size of the
underwater half of the image to match the size of the image above water.
In other words, it corrected the refractive index difference between air
and water and eliminated the distortion visible in the earlier pictures.
A combination of neutral density and red filters equalized the exposure
differences above and below. Today, these diopters are commonplace,
but Coles Phinizy was the first to use them.

11