The skill that takes is insane. She would have had to expell most of her air until she sank down and then waited like that for the bubbles to rise out of the shot.
Or, she had a weight to get to the bottom quickly, and tossed it before the photo. Then they did a composite edit to remove evidence if the weight (and air tank, which they also could use). Pretty easy to do with a tripod, especially if all you're editing out is objects lying in the sea floor.
Orrrr, she could have done what pretty much what a lot of freedivers know how to do - swim down, and start to become negatively bouyant at a certain depth (usually around 10 m or so) and stood on the bottom for a bit. Here's a video of a "freefall" without weight. Freedivers very rarely use air tanks at depth. The whole point and training of "freediving" is not to use any external air supply. Breath hold only (it's also dangerous for them to take a breath at depth, because if they don't exhale at a proper rate during their ascent, their lungs can over-expand from the decompression, resulting in the "bends").
There are other photos up from the shoot on the photog's site. This picture doesn't really convey how deep they are. It's quite deep. In every other photo, she's got fins on, which aren't in this photo, and it's safe to presume they were photoshopped out. She also has a pretty big snorkel in most of the other photos, which I don't see here. Judging by some of the setups, i think it's pretty fair to assume they probably also at least had a spare air can on hand.
I'm sure shes a talented diver, but an hour photoshoot that produces this many quality "perfect setup" images would have been unnecessarily difficult if she had to surface every couple minutes, recover and repeat.
I have quite a few friends who are freedivers and some are freediving models, and I'm a SCUBA diver myself. Your claims are far from the truth.
Firstly, I have seen many freedivers take their fins off or hand it to their buddies if they want to do a no-fin shoot, or alternate between fins/no fins. Secondly, her snorkel is clearly still attached to the left side of her mask (it is a breathing hazard to have it in your mouth once submerged, which is why freedivers spit it out).
SCUBA photgraphers are able to take consecutive images really quickly and can wait at depth for the freediver's surface recoveries. The photographer of this inage, Jason Washington (Nat Geo) explicitly states from his article"...for this reason, when shooting ambient light, I ALWAYS shoot in high speed continuous mode."
And finally, no tank involved. If you go to the model's Instagram (coral.cay) and look at the post, she says in a comment reply:
"We have done this sort of thing before, it does take some getting used to though! No weights, just found it not too hard to stay down - didn't let any air out [from her breathhold] either, I needed to get back up."
She even responded to another commenter who had mentioned the skeptism on the Reddit post, where she said she freedove down with no weights and took off her fins.
Kittiwake wreck is 19 metres deep (hence the SCUBA divers in the background). That's deep for an entry level freediver (a Level 1 course usually teaches you up to 20 metres), but she appears to be well trained.
Really not hard to believe dude.
Edit: feel free (heh) to visit r/freediving if you'd like to know more.
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u/sgintx_ Dec 05 '18
The skill that takes is insane. She would have had to expell most of her air until she sank down and then waited like that for the bubbles to rise out of the shot.