I’ve discovered and loved free-diving thanks to my father.

I remember long afternoons spent on a boat anchored a few meters away from black volcanic cliffs emerging from a blue that seemed bottmoless, in the Eolian Islands when I was about 7.

I remember my mother and me on the boat and the white and red buoy signaling my dad’s presence; I used to look at his snorkel move slowly on the surface, stop for a few seconds and then disappear when a fins stroke would broke the sunny silence for a few seconds.

I remember the moment when the sea would close again above Dad, those seemingly infinite moments when I used to imagine him flying in an unexplored world; I was admired, Mom was both fascinated and anxious.

I remember the dull sound of the water being pushed out of the emerging snorkel, my mom looking comforted and relaxed, and the deep signs left by the mask on my father’s face, as if his skin wanted to keep a memory of that hostile and welcoming blue.

It wasn’t long before I couldn’t resist the urge to follow him. Only a few memories come to surface about those first dives, but one is still clear and lively in my head. The entry to the tunnel through a submerged cliff was almost invisible from the surface; after a deep breath, a little fear and some strokes I found myself in that underwater tunnel who seemed endless to the eyes of a child. Once inside, though, astonishment wash away the fear: that black and cold tunnel turned red with strawberry anemonae, green with wrasses, pink with corals, brown with damselfishes. The end of the tunnel, lit by the sun, was blindingly white and the black shadow of my dad guided and reassured me in that journey that tasted like a fun game and a great challenge. The sea had won me over.

After almost 30 years, it’s touching to think that one of the other memories linked to my dad is once again underwater. Every man, at some point in his life, accepts that even his father, even his own lifelong hero, gets old. I understood it 2 years ago: I understood it when for the first time I watched Dad go back to the surface before me and watch me look for an octopus in a rock for a few seconds.

I can’t say why, but free-diving and I kinda drifted apart during the years between those two memories. I kept living the sea with passion and enthusiasm, surfing waves on the surface and breathing from a bottle on the bottom. Free-diving, though, stayed hidden for a while in a nook of my heart; only hidden.

Then my thirtieth birthday came and my girlfriend thought something incredibly simple, even if no one had ever thought about it before: Tommaso likes photography, Tommaso likes the sea. She bought me my first underwater camera. Free-diving came out of its hiding place and I discovered my greatest passion.

Many photographers, including me, love photography because they love the emotion of capturing a moment.

When I shoot while free-diving I taste that emotion to the fullest, because I know that what I see from the surface won’t be the same when I’m underwater, because I know that I won’t be able to stand still when I shoot, that it will be impossible to anticipate the fishes’ movements, that in a liquid world I will just have some seconds to find what I’m looking for, that I won’t be able to count on exposure and focus, but only on the composition of the shot, on the direction of the light, and on some luck. So, while I breathe, I tell myself the story I want to tell with the picture, I close my eyes, I imagine it and I dive into the blue. Most of the times the story told is different from the one that I had imagined, and it’s the sea that tells it….but, in the end, I like it anyway.

In this blog I tell you the stories captured by the sea and myself.