Peter Scoones - Legendary Underwater Cameraman!

There is little, if anything, that Peter Scoones does not know about underwater image making. A BAFTA and two Emmys surrounded by numerous other awards are testament to his creative achievements. But it is Peter's dual expertise in both beautiful, artistic cinematography and innovative technical wizardry which make him both unique and extra-ordinarily accomplished in this challenging field. His creative talent has taken him many times around the world for a string of unrivalled wildlife documentaries, many for the BBC Natural History Unit in the company of perhaps the greatest and most distinguished wildlife presenter ever known, Sir David Attenborough. However, he also designs, builds and maintains all his equipment and remains at the very cutting edge of his field today after an underwater career spanning nearly five decades.

He made his first film with an 8mm camera in a homemade Perspex box in the early 1960's, using only a mask, snorkel and fins. From there he has progressed to become one of the leading wildlife natural history underwater cameramen in the world. When I arrived to interview him at his central London flat he was designing a new viewfinder because the cameras he uses have changed their configuration. "Necessity is the mother of invention" says Peter, and never was it more applicable than to this exceptional man.

Born in Wanstead, North London in 1937 to a sailing family, a marine career seemed almost inevitable. After school he qualified as a naval architect but on subsequently passing the entrance exam to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth for commissioned officer training, his eyesight was tested below standard. So, when National Service loomed, instead of two years as a naval clerk he signed up for nine years in the RAF "to learn something useful". That something was photography.

At the time, Peter was a serious racing sailor "I'm the sort of chap who is 100% involved in whatever activity I am doing, nothing else intrudes" he says. Posted to Singapore, he headed the RAF sailing team. The fast, keeled sailing boats became sluggish when coated in marine algae and hauling them up slipways was time-consuming and cumbersome. Instead, the team borrowed masks and snorkels from the Navy and scrubbed the hulls underwater. Having never previously considered what was under the yachts he raced, Peter observed the shoals of pretty, colourful fish feasting on the debris. Around the same time Hans Hass's boat moored nearby and Peter had a 'eureka' moment. Hass was already his hero and Hass's presence and the lovely marine life meant the area was probably a prime location for the beautiful images he had seen on TV and in the cinema.

So, after persuading the Navy to teach the basics on their O2 rebreathers they formed a diving club. "The RAF disapproved of diving, considering it a dangerous activity, but we ignored them" Peter grins. Due to limited equipment they became highly adept at snorkelling and learned to skip breathe. "I could hold my breath underwater for 3-4 minutes, I still do it. You can't film while breathing it disturbs you, makes you wobble". Due to the lack of kit, as a temporary measure using RAF machine shops, recycled aircraft oxygen tanks and various hoses Peter built a couple of aqua lungs. "Demand valves are fairly simple things" he says, with typical understatement and modesty.

Already hooked on the underwater world through snorkelling, Peter's first ever dive, off Palau Tekukor nearly 50 years ago, was not without drama. Attached by rope "the tanks were very valuable, we didn't want to lose one" he floated down over the drop-off and with "wow" on his lips as a school of batfish wafted gently by he was completely captivated. With his skip breathing technique he stayed down far longer than expected for the air in the tank, so the crew began hauling the rope in. As he was being drawn inexorably towards a large cluster of nasty black sea-urchins, the stings of which can be very painful and indeed serious if multiple, he planted his feet firmly on the wall and pulled as hard as he could. Not only did his first dive feature beauty, awe and danger, he also incurred the wrath of the Far East boxing champion who he pulled into the water on the other end of the rope.

Peter was keen on both wildlife and photography since school days, so it wasn't long before his joint passions of image-making, diving and nature came together. Ever inventive, he would scavenge discarded, scratched aircraft windows returning them to stores and claiming a replacement, thus acquiring pristine sheets of Perspex to model housings from. He made cement from Perspex chips dissolved in chloroform, controls from used hydraulic linkages and created waterproof shafts - this was before o'rings were widely available. Unlike today when you can buy a housing off the shelf, there was nothing for it then but to build his own and in this he was truly a pioneer. "There was the Rolleimarin designed by Hass but that was way outside our budget, Nikonos which evolved out of Cousteau's Calypsophot didn't emerge until 1963, necessity is the mother of invention - if it doesn't exist, build it". There was that signature phrase again.

Tending towards moving film he housed a Bolex C-8 8mm cine camera and shot his first travel piece. He then moved from Singapore to Aden in the Red Sea and created his first feature film 'Breathless Moments'. This won the gold medal at the first Brighton film festival in 1965 and led to several production companies contacting him wishing to distribute the film. But, with great disappointment it transpired the 8mm media was not production quality and could not be used commercially. Peter immediately rejected 8mm, bought a 16mm camera and says "I could never afford to film for myself again. The film was so expensive I had to get paid in order to fund it".

Around this time he co-founded the British Society of Underwater Photographers (BSoUP) with Colin Doeg. Colin, a journalist at the time, has himself contributed significantly to British underwater photography including taking the first picture in British waters ever to win an open international underwater photographic competition. BSoUP is still going strong today boasting membership from many of the foremost underwater photographers in the UK. Having just celebrated it's 40th anniversary, Peter and Colin are still both regular attendees at the meetings in London, a testament to the down to earth nature of both these amazing men.

Says Colin "being a superb camera mechanic as well as accomplished photographer helps Peter handle with aplomb the most dreaded event in any underwater photographer's life... a flood. It is an unforgettable experience to see him calmly pour pints of sea water out of his custom-made camera housing and begin to salvage his expensive video camera anywhere on land or sea. Surrounded by an awe-struck audience and often an ashen producer or client - he can strip his camera down to its carcass, wash and sun-dry all the vital electronic circuit boards and have it working again in as little as a couple of hours".

Colin continues "Peter is hugely talented and is probably the most self-sufficient wildlife underwater cameraman in the world. He has introduced many new ideas, including the use of polecams and cameras slung beneath radio controlled rafts. In the early days in the UK he pioneered the concept of standard sized openings in the body of housings so the ports were interchangeable, something we all take for granted today. He also used to produce correction lens from raw Perspex and blow his own dome ports".

At the end of his nine year stint he left the RAF and joined a colour laboratory in London. For the next few years he absorbed as much as possible about underwater filming. To supplement his strong technical background and optical knowledge he thoroughly researched and read everything ever written on the subject, teaching himself. "I learnt from anyone who could tell me" he says, "I was a sponge, soaking up everything that I needed".

During this time Peter became involved in a production company and continued to push the boundaries of underwater filming. Combining his by now extensive knowledge with an electronics expert colleague, they invented systems for the oil industry. One such project was developing inspection cameras for the BP offshore oil platforms. The only other equipment in existence was inadequate for the low visibility of the North Sea. So, necessity calling again, they developed a camera based on the silicon-intensified technology being used by NASA which functioned in low-light and worked remotely from the platform without the need for divers.

Their reputations spread and one day there was a knock on the door of the workshop in Richmond just outside London. It was David Attenborough (subsequently to become Sir David) and a colleague from the BBC Natural History Unit who wanted to film a live coelacanth in low-light conditions, something that had never been done before. The primitive looking, pre-historic coelacanth,

which usually lives around 1,000ft deep, was only re-discovered in the last century after scientists thought it had become extinct along with the dinosaurs, 65 million years earlier. Attenborough was heading to the Comores islands as part of the BBCs 'Life on Earth' series to follow up reports of local fishermen hauling coelacanths up from the deep. He had heard about Peter's camera and wanted to hire it. Peter seized his opportunity. Not only had he read about the coelacanth in school and long harboured an ambition to film it, but he also knew his camera was a completely unique and innovative asset that he was certainly not going to hand over for someone else to use. "I told them they could have my equipment for free" he recalls "as long as they paid for me to go out with them and operate it".

Thus began Peter's long standing involvement with the BBC including 'Reefwatch', 'The Trials of Life', 'Sea Trek', 'Life in the Freezer', 'The Blue Planet' and 'Planet Earth' which was the first broadcast in hi