Bubble Bath

There’s this moment right after you dive beneath the surface when something inside your body shifts. Your heart rate slows, your body relaxes, and it’s like your entire system remembers it was built for the water. That’s called the mammalian dive reflex — a natural response our bodies share with marine mammals that helps us adapt when we’re submerged. It’s one of my favorite feelings in the world, and one of the reasons I love summers in The Bahamas—when I can skip the wetsuit and feel the water directly on my skin. To capture this photograph, the model and I hiked through the bush to reach an inland cave that’s mostly hidden under rock. The water there is colder, perfectly still, and home only to red shrimp and a few rare cave fish. The cave’s floor is fragile—a soft mix of fine soil and bat guano that can cloud the water for half an hour with even the slightest touch. Because there’s no current to clear it, we had to be extremely careful not to disturb anything. We even left our fins behind to move slowly and stay in control during each dive. While waiting for the sun to rise high enough to send light beams deeper into the cave, I started shooting near the entrance. With light only entering at a certain angle, everything caught in its path seemed to glow against the pitch-black background. The water’s surface stayed perfectly flat—no current, no movement—creating these clean reflections that made it feel as if time had stopped. Whenever I photograph people underwater, I try to capture them in natural, unscripted moments without too much direction. Those genuine movements always feel the most real. In this photo, between the stillness of the cave and the calm of the dive reflex, it felt like we’d found complete peace—just floating in silence, suspended between light and darkness.