THE (MIS)ADVENTURES OF ONE VR PHOTOGRAPHER by Greg Downing
I had been in Tikal, Guatamala, for seven days, working on a project for UNESCO and UC Berkeley. I had taken over 11,000 photos and, even though I was exhausted, I could not make myself stop because my surroundings were so inspiring. I was planning on going and shooting a second Mayan site but thought I would take a break from photography for a few days and go diving off one of the cayes in Belize. I did this for a few days and it was great. I started to notice how amazing the skies were and thought this would be the perfect spot to shoot a sky library to be used by 3D artists. So I hired a boat and asked the driver if he knew of any sand bars offshore, a spot where you could barely see the island so the horizon would be clear. He said he knew of just the spot and would drop me off there and pick me up at the end of the day.
The spot he was thinking of was two, two-feet in diameter pieces of dead coral sticking out of the ocean. This was a little less ground than I bargained for. It was very strange to be out there for so long with nothing but sky and water in every direction. Every time I turned my head I expected to see something but it was just more sky and water.
Coral is not ideal to stand on; it is equal parts slippery and sharp. I was thinking I would be on sand and was only wearing flip-flops, bad choice. I had to remove them because my feet were slipping inside of them when I was standing on the rock taking pictures. There was not much room on these two pieces of coral. I had a chair set up on one piece of coral where I would sit and read for 20 minutes between shooting panos. On the second piece I had my tripod set up and, because there was no surface to set anything down, I had the rest of my gear hanging from the tripod. Unfortunately, twice I knocked my camera and almost sent all my gear into the ocean. This made me very nervous but I couldn't really pack up and call the whole thing off at this point so I committed myself to a high level of concentration and was being really focused and careful.
After a few hours of being out there I was shooting and, unknown to me, a ranger spotted me from a distance. He was able to approach me very quickly from behind and I was unable to hear his boat because the wind was blowing in my face and there were waves slapping against my piece of coral. He pulled up within 10 feet of me and called out, "Everything ok?!?!"
Thinking I was alone for miles this startled me so badly that I slipped. At first I was falling toward my camera but managed to swing my arms wildly enough to make myself fall backwards. It was a disaster; it was akin to stepping off a table backwards without expecting it. I stepped down with all my weight and a bare foot onto an enormous sea urchin. It felt like stepping on knives. That leg instantly crumpled and then I landed with my second leg on another sea urchin, sending spines into my shin. I managed to pull myself out of the hole I was in and looked at the bottom of my foot. I had three five-inch brilliant purple spines sticking out. I plucked these out and then when I wiped the blood off saw that I had at least 50 more spines that had broken off inside my foot! Some went all the way through the flesh on the side of my foot and completely through the pad of one of my toes sideways. I also got another 30 or so in my shin. The ranger asked me if I needed to leave and I say, “yes” of course. He then said he had to do something quickly and left.
Then I was alone for the next 45 minutes. It was very hard to pack everything up to go again because now I was hopping around on one foot on the sharp slippery coral in the middle of the ocean. I couldn't keep my hands from shaking and I think I was going into shock. I was then even more nervous trying to safely put my camera away and getting ready to leave. When he finally returned he took me to the boat I came out on. The man operating the boat used to be a fisherman and told me that I should pee on my injuries and that the ammonia in the urine would neutralize the poison and then I would be fine in a few days.
I followed his instructions and he took me back to my hotel. I went straight to the bar and treated my wounds with rum, taken orally. Unfortunately he was not right about it getting better in a few days, I continued to have problems walking for about a month, so went to a doctor; they ended up having to re-cut the wounds and remove them. I guess that normally the spines don't break off if you don't step on them so hard and it usually looks as if there were spines but it is really just purple dye from the spine that is in your flesh and that dissolves within a couple of days.
Related Articles Greg Downing discusses his lastest project shooting the ancient ruins of Tikal, Guatamala in HDRI , to be used in conjunction with laserscanning for a UNESCO project, in SHOOTING THE MAYAN PYRAMIDS OF TIKAL FOR UNESCO.
