A childhood as a Navy brat took Kip F. Evans all over the world with his family, including a consequential trip to Polynesia where he went snorkeling with his brother and dad and saw a reef for the first time. That trip clinched his affection for the ocean. He got certified to scuba dive at 16 and continued to develop his technical skill as he pursued science before photography.
He earned a degree in environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara, then became a volunteer diver in the Channel Islands, spending hundreds of hours underwater surveying species.
His evolution as a photographer started more incidentally. As a teen diving, he remembers that his dad (a hobbyist photographer) would run out of air first and return to the surface; he would leave his underwater camera behind with his sons. “I had a lot of early success with it, and it inspired me,” Evans says.
The two worlds – diving and photography – eventually converged into a career specializing in underwater photography. He spent 12 years working with National Geographic, including five years in one-person submersibles on the Sustainable Seas project as deep as 1,800 feet below the surface. In 2016, he spent 17 days underwater off the coast of Florida as an “aquanaut” in an underwater habitat as part of a project called Mission 31 with Fabian Cousteau. He also volunteered with the Pacific Grove Ocean Rescue Team through which participated in recovering John Denver’s remains after a plane crash near Pacific Grove in 1997.
Evans lives in Pebble Beach and also keeps a fine art photo studio in the Barnyard shopping center in Carmel. His collection includes underwater images and the local coastline, as well as many taken from backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada.
Weekly: There are so many photographers who focus on nature and landscape. How do you differentiate yourself?
Evans: I come from part science, part creative background. If you pull back those curtains – it might be the geology of an area – and look at more intricate details and lines, that is what inspires me, seeing beyond the colors and shapes and what everyone else sees. I start looking deeper.
What do you see when you look deeper?
Color, light and, in the case of ocean and wave images, power. I feel most at home when I’m in the water.
I love the ocean but I’m not a diver – can you tell me about what makes diving feel different?
You’re free-falling through the water column. It’s this feeling of weightlessness, like you could descend through the air, but you’re in the water. You realize you’re entering this whole new universe.
How did you develop as a photographer beyond borrowing your dad’s gear?
Underwater equipment is very expensive. In college, [using a lower-cost regular camera] I would go to the tide pools and spend hours photographing marine invertebrates and just get lost for hours. My key is I am always trying to make eye contact with my subjects.
But some invertebrates living in tide pools don’t have eyes.
There are ways to photograph things that help identify them as a living organism. It’s the difference between just taking a picture and figuring out the angle to make that organism look its best, to bring it to life.
Tell me about being in the one-person deep submersibles, where solo voyages would usually last three to four hours.
You’d wear street clothes and dress in layers; as you go deeper it gets colder and colder. They say you could survive up to two days [with food and oxygen] but I don’t think you could mentally survive that long.
One of my most amazing stories was in 1999, diving along slopes of Monterey Bay Canyon to 1,100 feet on the Fourth of July. Unbeknownst to me, it had gotten really rough on the surface and the communication box got knocked [to the floor of] the boat. We wait a certain amount of time and start surfacing if we haven’t heard from them.
To conserve battery power I turned off my lights. In the dark, all of a sudden I start seeing these glowing, green dots turning off and on. Within 20 minutes there were thousands of what turned out to be krill, bioluminescing all around me.
Was that scary or liberating?
It’s a little bit of both. I was excited to be down there, you need to cherish it. You’re frightened the boat may not be above you.
You joined a team living underwater for 17 of their 31 days. How was it?
The hardest part for me was even though you could see the sun at the surface, you never feel air or the sun.
But you’re in this incredible place. It’s a lot like space; more people have lived in space than have lived underwater.