Interview:Şeyda Maraş Underwater Photographer

Şeyda Maraş underwater photographer

Şeyda Maraş is a diver, underwater photographer and professional cinematographer who specializes in underwater video projects. She currently works on the Bougainville Diving Boat and takes photos of divers and try divers. Most of her customers like her photos as reminders or mementos of their diving experience in Kaş and Şeyda enjoys making their experience a good one.

See our Scuba Diving Price List and Contact Form (below).
Underwater photos © Şeyda Maras on the Bougainville Web Album
Şeyda was born in Adana but her father, an agricultural engineer, moved a lot because of his work so, every two or three years, the family ended up in different places. In 1994, Şeyda entered Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and studied there until she moved to Kaş in 2000. She first visited Kaş in 1997 and liked it very much and took other holidays here until she decided to move to Kaş permanently. The year 2000 was a year of political and economic shocks throughout the country and she wanted to get away from Istanbul and its big city problems and decided that Kaş was just what she was looking for. She first worked as a waitress in a local café and later in Alarga Restaurant as a cook and waitress.

Since she had finished her classroom work at the university, she decided to continue to work on her last two years of school projects creating underwater photography and videography while living in Kaş.

Diver Preparation

Şeyda first met Atila Kara, BT dive instructor, in 2001 and a relationship was born. She took dive lessons in 2002 and later became an advanced open water diver. She does not know now exactly how many dives she has but believes it may be close to 1000. After she developed her diving skills she tried her hand at underwater still photography of plants, animals and other underwater objects. Over the years she has taken many underwater photos and there is a book of her work in the Bougainville Adventure and Diving office.

Photo © by Şeyda Maraş

Şeyda likes to make her customers happy with her photographs and at the same time help them to see humour in the photos. She takes many photos of “try (discover) divers” who experience the underwater world for the first time. This often makes for wide eyed, and sometimes humorous, photos of these very excited first timers. She also tries to show them at their best and coaches them before they enter the water whether they are experienced or try divers. She gives them a series of hand signals to perform and she talks them through what she plans to do while taking their photograph. She also warns the new or first time divers that because of their excited state, they may end up looking funny in the photos and not to be disappointed because this is a common experience. Most of her customers have had many a good laugh at the results of their first time experiences. Usually though, if all goes well, the results are almost always, more than satisfying to the customer.

Photo © by Şeyda Maraş

Her experience with customers over the years has yielded some interesting observations. She notes, not surprisingly, that families often want photos of them together underwater. This is not always possible with try/discover divers because these are one-to-one with an experienced instructor and it is difficult to get a family together at the same time underwater. She also noticed that women want to look “their best” in their photos and often take some trouble with their hair or mask adjustment or other such things before they allow Şeyda to take their photo. Men, however, being “macho” usually want to appear strong, capable or even risk taking such as taking off their mask or taking their regulator out of their mouths underwater, or otherwise show off.

Scorpion Fish, Kaş, Turkey

Şeyda has had some unusual underwater photo experiences. When she first started taking photos she was experimenting with a wide angle lens on her camera. This type of lens makes things appear farther away than they are and she came upon a Scorpion Fish
and started to take several photos getting closer and closer. At one moment she lowered her camera and realized that she was literally face-to-face with this rather deadly sea creature. Fortunately she was not harmed but came away much wiser for the experience.

She remembered that she had a try/discover dive customer who was quite nervous before he entered the water. She coached him as usual and she told him that when she gave him a hand signal he should repeat the hand signal so she could take a photo of him giving the signal to his friends and family who would be viewing the photo. He followed her instructions very literally, too much so because she would give him a hand signal and then lower her hands to retrieve her camera and he would do exactly the same thing she did and also lowered his hands. She was not very successful with this diver in getting him to give an underwater hand signal but she took some very funny photos of him which he thought were great when he viewed them later. He told Şeyda after the dive that he was so nervous that he forgot he was supposed to be posing for her and not just blindly mimicking her movements!

Şeyda first started work on underwater video with a camera she borrowed from the Bougainville office. After becoming proficient with that camera, she bought her own in the fall of 2003. She purchased her first digital underwater still camera in 2006 and uses it with her customers and for other professional shoots.

Şeyda considers herself first a Cinematographer/Videographer, and in fact during an interview with Zaman newspaper in 2007 she discovered that she was the first woman underwater videographer in Turkey!
(Links to these articles are in Turkish)
http://www.zaman.com.tr/haber.do?haberno=798615&keyfield=C59F65796461206D617261C59F
http://www.kameraarkasi.org/yonetmenler/ayseseydamaras.html

Şeyda has a very full resume of accomplishments. 2004 was the year she entered competition and came away with the second prize in the Eastern Mediterranean Film Festival for her film “Meditations of the Sea.” In 2005 she did a film for one of her school projects using Emre Çevikel, who is now the BT Chief Dive Instructor, and Ayşe Dağıstanlı, our BT interviewer and translator, as her performers. Şeyda also won a prize in the International Environmental Film Festival. 2006 saw her completing a documentary on Cave Explorers with the financial backing of a grant from the Turkish Ministry of Cultural Affairs. And, in 2008, she was the subject of a TV5 Monde (a French TV group) documentary called Gardens of the Mediterranean. She is currently working on a couple of different screen plays which she hopes to develop into professional films in the near future.

A very busy and enterprising young woman, Şeyda Maraş is an inspiration to us all.

See our Scuba Diving Price list for all dive courses.

Use this form to contact us for more information about courses or discounts on multiple dives, groups or equipment purchases or to book your next dive.

Interview:Şeyda Maraş Underwater Photographer

See our Scuba Diving Price list for all dive courses.

BOUGAINVILLE TRAVEL