Marcelo Johan Ogata
My passion for photographing small critters started way before I actually became a diver.
I remember back in the days when I first started shooting macro photography on land. Building homemade flashes out of foil and cardboard boxes. Combining cheap plastic extension tubes with my old kit lenses to be able to magnify my subjects and even get black backgrounds out of it.
I mastered close-up technics and other compositions by capturing portraits of dragon-flies, spiders and other insect models while living in a vineyard in New Zealand.
This hobby became such an obsession to a point I was “bug dreaming”.
Although this unique and exquisite passion got a lot more intense when I discovered the underwater world of Borneo, specially a peculiar Island named Mabul island, a diving destination all about underwater macro creatures!
Mabul was a simple and humble home for me and the first Dive master job. Those 20 months spent eating chicken and rice while practicing underwater photography alone and later videography.
Using similar methods to those days I snapped bugs in the vineyard, holding a camera housing while diving became quick my second nature.
10 years later, 4000 dives logged around 14 different countries and still finding the Underwater World a fascinating and inspiring place to be. Today, thanks to the advanced 4K technology, prime lenses, drones and lots of fire in the belly I have become a self taught underwater photographer and filmmaker based in the most biodiverse and heart of the Coral Triangle.
