VERO BEACH — Underwater photographer Mike Ricciardi knows what lengths women go to for beauty – he spent a career with Avon, the cosmetics company, eventually heading a management team over 300,000 “Avon ladies” who sold the company’s products from home. As for his own quest for beauty, he has sunk to great depths himself.
Rather than a swarm of saleswomen, he tracks schools of tropical fish.
Twice a year, he and his wife, Ann, a travel agent, organize elaborate dive vacations for themselves and up to 10 friends, booking live-aboard dive boats – fitted as floating photo labs – for a week or more.
His website of undersea images, DiverMike.com, reads like a college geography class, with emphasis in the islands of the far western Pacific: Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Maldives.
“The more remote, the better the diving,” Ricciardi says.
The couple’s passion for diving began on a vacation to Grand Cayman in 1980 when they were living in land-locked Atlanta.
“We were geared up for snorkeling and saw these other guys with their scuba gear. My wife said, ‘Hey, that looks like fun.’ So we got certified.”
So did their son, Michael – he was an instructor by the age of 18. Their daughter, Kristin, wasn’t interested.
Once the kids were grown, the couple’s love of the ocean prompted Ricciardi to ask Avon for a transfer to Florida.
They bought a home on Vero’s island in 1992, and a few years later, built another, this time with a view of the river – their dream.
Twelve years ago, at age 55, Ricciardi retired and the dive trips to exotic locations began in earnest.
Now even more avid a diver than her husband, Ann Ricciardi’s dive log is more extensive than her husband’s.
“She’s got 1,400 dives, I’ve got 1,300. She says, ‘I don’t want to dive with you. You miss half the stuff when you’re down there buried in a camera.’”
A former travel agent, Ann Ricciardi can spend months organizing the trips with countless flight connections, transfers to trains, and overnight stays in remote places.
The trips are self-generating: on each boat, they meet people who want to join them on their next trip.
Once the diving gets underway, Ann Ricciardi’s work is behind her. She is ready to have fun.
For Mike Ricciardi though, the work is just beginning.
After an hour in the water, he’s back on board in the boat’s photo lab, loading his images into a computer, adjusting, cropping, deleting and organizing.
Flipping backwards off the dive boat in his dive gear – his own, never rented – he bobs on the surface while reaching for 13 pounds of photographic equipment, gingerly passed to him by someone on the boat.
Ricciardi uses a Nikon camera encased in a $4,300 waterproof shell, with a choice of lens, either wide angle or macro for close-ups.
Connected to that pricey package are two strobe lights extending to each side like a crab’s claws on the defensive.
Ricciardi’s photos show nothing of his challenges underwater.
Chief among them: buoyancy. The force requires constant adjustment with a buoyancy compensator so that once he focused on a specimen, he doesn’t rise or sink.
Once he spies a specimen in just the right setting, he goes after what he calls “the money shot” – the image that will sell once it’s printed and matted.
He holds his breath so as not to release air bubbles and spook the fish.
He locks on visually, trying not to move his head while he raises his camera to his mask and focuses.
“And then the damn thing’s got its back to you.”
Sometimes, the view from the rear is just what he wants.
One favorite photograph is of an 18-foot-long stunningly marked whale shark, the largest fish in the world, he says.
In the shot, the shark has its tail toward Ricciardi, who was focused instead on two Japanese divers who in turn are photographing the shark’s face, ever the tourists with the camera.
Guides from the live-aboard boat direct them toward the creatures. The boats, from 80 to 150 feet in length go “island to island, lagoon to lagoon.”
“You get on board and they’ve got everything you would ever want as a photographer. Cleaning stations, charging stations, wonderful food.”
The tour extends above water as well.
“You get to stop at all the different islands. The locals put on a big deal. They do dances and shows.”
Once, he returned 10 years later to a village in the Solomon Islands.
“I showed the village chief a photograph of a 5-year-old kid I’d taken, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so. He’s right over there.’”
Back home in between trips, Ricciardi stalks the jetties of the Sebastian Inlet with a rod and reel, his camera high and dry above the crashing waves as he documents the catches of local anglers for the inlet website.
As for diving nearby – even in the Keys and the Caribbean, Ricciardi isn’t much interested.
“I hate to say it, but it’s just so vanilla. There may be 25 varieties of butterfly fish in the Keys. If you go to Indonesia there’s 250. There is a soft coral that exists in the Caribbean, but they’re not the gorgeous fuchsias and pinks and yellows that you see in other parts of the world. When you’re taking pictures, you want color.”
Ricciardi was only vaguely aware of a shark bite that occurred off Vero’s beaches earlier this summer. That threat doesn’t faze him though.
He describes the atolls near Thailand, tops of volcanoes with cuts that open up to the ocean as the tides rise and recede.
“It flows just like the Sebastian Inlet: where you have high speed water, that’s where the fish are, and that’s where the sharks are. But there, you would see not three or four sharks; you’d see 400. When you flipped into the water, you had to look around so you wouldn’t drop onto a shark.” His wife, he says, is leery of sharks and not eager to get into those waters.
Not the case for Ricciardi.
“I’m more interested in getting the picture,” he says. “They’re curious. Sometimes they’ll come up and check you out. But that’s good. You get your shot.”