>At 16 she enrolled in a diving course, and when she finished school at 18 she went on a dive holiday to the Red Sea. That's when her life's path took a plunge beneath the waves. Not ready to return to London at the end of her vacation, she got a job at a dive center and did odd jobs to make ends meet. She recalls being quite good at "cleaning the loo." One advantage she had was being English where most of the captains and instructors were Egyptian. This gave her the language and cultural knowledge to work as a hostess aboard the daily dive boats.
>Holloway's time in Egypt provided some great dive experiences, but to make a career of it she needed to become an instructor. She enrolled in an Instructor Development Course in Sharm el Sheikh and upon graduating got a job on Grand Cayman, first at Red Sail Sports and then at Bob Soto's Diving, where she became one of three staff videographers filming the tourists as they dived.
>After three years she decided there was more to life than producing tourist videos and in 1995 headed back to London, where the underwater production scene there was just coming to life. Mike Portelly and others were shooting movies and stills in local pools, generating enough work to keep an assistant occupied. She found opportunity and inspiration to develop a portfolio of her own work, which led to a two-month gig shooting in Uruguay for National Geographic.
>In 2002 Holloway traveled to Ibiza, Spain, to photograph the UK freedive team. During the shoot she found communication with the divers difficult and had to repeatedly swim to the surface to tell them what she was looking for. Although she was never deeper than 33 feet, it was a long day of zig-zag profiles and no safety stops. After the shoot she had some symptoms that made her very concerned about decompression sickness (DCS). She drank some water and took some aspirin (not what DAN® would recommend), and fortunately her symptoms subsided. But in the course of that health scare she discovered she was pregnant. Her panic and subsequent research about the potential effects on her unborn child led to the realization that DCS could be dangerous to a developing fetus. Happily, her daughter was a normal, healthy child, and Holloway continued on with a career that involved both open-ocean photography and many more pool photo sessions commissioned to bring to life art directors' visions.
>From there Holloway's career turned to a more stylized and commercial genre, involving work with art directors, stylists and talented models all working together to create vibrant underwater sets. Today she is one of the most creative and in-demand producers of underwater fantasy images in both stills and video. Her client list includes Nike, Speedo, Umbro, Sony, Jacuzzi as well as publications such as GQ, Observer Magazine and How To Spend It. Based in London, she lives with her husband and their three young children, Brooke, Willow and Woody.
>In deference to her need to shoot both high-quality stills and 4K video, her primary underwater system is a Canon EOS-1D C in a Seacam housing. Her lighting systems include Ikelite strobes underwater and a variety of studio lights above the surface as dictated by the set and the concept. She does much of the postproduction work herself but often prefers to take images only as far as rough concepts before turning them over to a digital artist for the refinements necessary to make them finished pieces of art.
>Read along as Holloway tells the stories behind some of her images.
>
>
>"In 2007 I was commissioned to create the photo illustrations for a retelling of Charles Kingsley's classic 1863 book, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby. The version I read as a child was illustrated with paintings, but this retelling combined my photos with artwork from illustrator Heidi Taylor to create the whimsical fantasies of the book.
>"I fell in love with Sue Flood's Whale Calf photograph and was delighted when she agreed to let me use it for the book. I had to get the child to fit the existing composition, so we shot him against a gray background underwater, which actually worked much better than expected. I love the child's wrinkly little feet and the white parasitic crabs on the whale from the original.
>"In the story the main character, Tom, meets all sorts of incredible underwater creatures; I thought the turbot image came together really nicely. I used a stock image of the fish, and the challenge was to get the light on the boy to match the lighting on the fish. Once this was achieved, it was a blessedly simple composition."
>
>"In 2008 organizers of a freediving championship invited me to take pictures. The competition took place in 330 feet of blue water and was staged from a tanker moored off the coast of Cyprus. The visibility was sensational — a photographer's dream. Freedivers swarmed everywhere, diving up and down the lines from the boat. The freediver in this image in particular caught my attention as he looked like he was enjoying the freedom of the water. His pose says it all. Actually, I shot it the other way around, as a horizontal with the sun at the top, and it wasn't until I got it to the editing table and turned it that it became the image it is here. It has since been printed many times for art collectors' walls."
>
>
>"Speedo has been a loyal client for me over the years. They tend to run similar kinds of stylized advertisements each year, and I get a lot of repeat business from them. This model is Charlie Turner, who at the time was one of the fastest swimmers in the UK and made a great model for the image. All the retouching was completed by the advertising agency in London that took over that side of things after I had completed the shoot in the swimming pool. Sometimes I do my own retouching and postproduction work in Photoshop, but often the clients prefer to execute their own vision. That's one of the big differences between my personal work and commercial assignments."
>
>
>
>As we were fizzing out before flying home after the job, I somehow managed to persuade him to get back in the water to do a test shot for me from the beach of the hotel. I wanted an action shot, and among a few variations was this running sequence, which came to life when I added the shark. I'll be returning to the Bahamas this summer to run an underwater photography workshop, where I look forward to making more images like this."
>Watch the videos below to learn more about Holloway and her work.
>
>
>© Alert Diver — Q1 Winter 2016