Welcome back to Cameraman.com! First of all I would like to thank you all for your visit and for your support to the community!
This time I would like to introduce you with Glenn Harris, a cameraman, editor and director who works between New York and Los Angeles. Glenn has had a lifelong career in cinema and television. He began at the age of 2 as a child actor appearing in features and television – notably in the 80s classic “Say Anything” and a regular on daytime soap opera “General Hospital”. He switched to the production side after attending film school at USC. His hobbies include flying airplanes, surfing, and scuba diving.
Glenn tells us a bit about how he discovered scuba diving and a few tips of underwater filmmaking. As I’m also a passionate about underwater filmmaking  I will be posting more interviews… so stay in touch!

Cameraman: Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got started with diving and underwater filming?

Glenn: About a year ago I was looking for a new adventure. I’m from Southern California where most all of my friends and I grew up surfing and snowboarding. I love both of those, but diving was something not as many people seemed to do. When I breathed underwater for the first time, even though it was just in a pool, I was hooked.
Underwater filming then became a natural outgrowth for me. Filmmaking has always been in my life – through child acting, going to film school, and now leading a career in it. The difference though with underwater shooting is I was driven purely by a sense of exploration and adventure that I wanted to share with everyone.

Cameraman: How do you choose the locations and what video equipment do you take with you?

Glenn: I want to go everywhere. Once I became a diver, the world opened up a lot, I’m dying to go to remote parts of the world that I’d never considered visiting before. There are certain places where the whole local economy is based on scuba diving. Like stepping on the yoga mat, it is a true “timeout” from the hustle of LA and NYC.

Cameraman: Tell me about the camera you use and your favorite lenses.

Glenn: I own a Canon 60D and was about to invest in an underwater kit that was going to cost me well more than the camera itself. Then the GoPro HD came out and though I was skeptical at first, I got one and it made a lot of sense. There are certain limitations to it, but the image quality, ease of use, not to mention packing for travel when you’re already bringing all this other dive gear, is so clutch.

Cameraman: A lot of people had problems to get smooth shots underwater? How do you stabilize your images?

Glenn: On land you have many tools and toys for cameras to get great shots – stabilizers, jib, tripods, etc… but underwater things really change.
What was interesting to me was discovering how my body really can become one of these “tools” underwater. When you become a comfortable diver you learn how to use your breath to regulate your buoyancy and that smooth breath and minimal body movements translate to getting an equally smooth shot. I think there’s also an element you have to consider in that you are turning yourself over to the underwater environment and should behave like the fish do. I swear they look at me weird if I try to move like I do on land and kick or paddle unnecessarily. However, once you accept the laws of the underwater world, the fish want nothing but to swim with you and even show off. Trailing a turtle over the reef in crystal clear 85°F/30°C water, right behind him, at his pace, gave me just as much satisfaction as any shot I’ve got on land.

Cameraman: In terms of technique, how do you determine things such as camera movement, aperture and focus?

Glenn: This is where the limitations of the GoPro are felt. You really don’t have any control over aperture, except for picking a center weighted or spot metering setting well beforehand. Coming stock, the GoPros have an underwater focus issue. The concave of the housing throws things off underwater. Before this trip, I got my hands on a custom housing that fixed this issue. The other problem was low light conditions. In some of the darker areas, like swim-thrus or wreck diving, the whole color profile would get thrown off and there was nothing I could really do. This is where being a good editor comes into play by being able to cut around things.

Cameraman:  Which affordable camera would you recommend to someone wanting to try their hand at making some underwater films?

Glenn: Affordability? GoPro – absolutely.

Cameraman: What’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened to you during a shoot?

Glenn: When we were doing the wreck dive, on our ascent I noticed this solitary fish making its way slowly toward the ship. It was so beautiful with no one else around that I had to go back down and shoot it. It ended up working as an amazing shot introduction to the section where we visit the ship. The thing was, I was a bit low on air since it was the end of the dive. So I checked my dive buddy’s air level and he had a lot more than I did. I communicated to him I was going back to shoot this fish and he came with me. By the time I got back to make the ascent I was below 500psi/35bar(the level you’re supposed to be at when you surface). So we were very responsible and we did a controlled “buddy breath” ascent where we locked arms and I drew breath from his alternate regulator.

Cameraman: Tell me about one of the most challenging experience you’ve had while shooting?

Glenn: On this trip it was initially about maintaining a cool while at these depths. I had never been down to 100ft/30m before. To jaded divers that’s nothing, yet the first time I peered at my gauge and it read 100ft/30m, it was a psychological trip. But just like flying an airplane, you have to keep calm and accept the challenge of the conditions you’re operating in.
Another thing about this Cayman dive was the sheer awe of swimming out over these walls they have down there that drop thousands of feet. I heard afterward that some of the dive spots in my video have had suicide problems at them – people who want to die underwater and they just keep descending and descending these walls until they run out of air and eventually sink to the bottom with the weight of the gear. No thanks.

Cameraman: What are some of your favorite films?

Glenn: I could go on and on about my favorite movies but keeping with the theme of underwater films, the one I always seem to think about when diving is The Abyss. I don’t think in a narrative sense anyone has been able to top the feeling of being submerged that James Cameron captured with that. He knew exactly how to do it because he’s a huge dive buff. I worked on Avatar  as a production assistant and that set was all green screens, motion-capture equipment and rows of computers and from that experience, you couldn’t tell how the movie was going to look; but when I finally got to see the movie, the influence of the underwater world on it was undeniable… the way some of the organisms behaved…I am absolutely thrilled to see what he comes up with for Avatar 2 which I’ve heard will explore the oceans of Pandora. I think you can see an underwater influence in almost everything he does.

Cameraman: What are your plans for the future with underwater filming?

Glenn: To attract work for advertisements for resorts , dive boats, surf videos, documentary or what have you. I’m also writing ideas to include underwater segments as part of a script to direct.

Cameraman: Thank you Glenn for this inspiring interview. Looking forward to do a diving together one day!

Glenn: I’m very grateful to be featured on your blog. Thank you for having me and to anyone watching my video.

More about Glenn on his website: Gharris.net
You can watch more videos here: Vimeo.com
Photos by Ashley A. Poole: Ashleypoolephoto

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