In January 1989, I joined the ranks of volunteer guides at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I decided to volunteer for a pretty simple reason: I'd just moved to the area and wanted to get involved, plus I lived only four blocks from the aquarium and figured I’d be able to get there every week. Little did I know, when I crept shyly into the volunteer lounge for my first day “on shift,” that I was about to join an embracing family.

In that family are all sorts of people who inspire me for various reasons—for their intelligence and curiosity, for their warmth and gentle good spirits, for their enthusiastic energy. Two people who epitomize all those characteristics have become special inspirations to me. Their names are Libby and Lovell Langstroth, and at 78 and 83 years old, respectively, they have a lot more on the ball than many people I know who are half their age.

Libby and Lovell moved to the Monterey Peninsula from Berkeley in 1980 for retirement. He had been a physician, she is an anthropologist. Once here, they avidly took up diving, and availed themselves of resources at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station and California State University’s Moss Landing marine biology facility. In essence, they made a second career out of marine biology, epitomizing the word amateur: they simply loved everything about this rich subtidal world. Each of them logged more than 650 dives on the Monterey Peninsula—with Libby starting this new pursuit at the age of 54. In the course of learning all they could about the creatures of this environment, they perfected their photographic skills.

Recently, I had the privilege of working with them on a book of photographs and descriptive essays about some of the fascinating animals of Monterey Bay with which they became acquainted. A Living Bay, due out from the University of California Press in October, will be a stunning guide to the subtidal world of central California. It features photos that Libby and Lovell shot both on the spot and in a home darkroom equipped with a dissecting microscope, then printed themselves. Their prints, together with captions describing the lives of creatures ranging from strawberry anemones to slipper snails to sea urchins, have been exhibited at the California Academy of Sciences, Pacific Grove Natural History Museum, Lawrence Hall of Science, and Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Many of their photographs are part of the displays at the Monterey Bay Aquarium as well.

Early this year Libby and Lovell moved from a beautiful big home overlooking Point Lobos, south of Carmel, into a retirement apartment in Pacific Grove. They still have a microscope set up in their kitchen (who needs a Kitchen-Aid anyway?), and friends of theirs living nearby acquired much of their darkroom equipment, so they’re still able to print. They stopped diving, however—Lovell's heart just isn't what it used to be—at the ages of 75 and 80. But there's still warm-water snorkeling. Within the next few months, in fact, they’re headed for Hawaii, where they're looking forward to snorkeling every day. The sea and its creatures are definitely in their blood.

Not long ago, I sat down and chatted with Libby and Lovell about their careers as divers and underwater photographers. What follows are some of their stories and a small sampling of their photographs.

C&O: How did you get interested in the ocean and decide to get certified as divers?

Libby: I've always been interested in the ocean. When I was a girl we had a sailboat; we sailed in San Francisco Bay all the time, and once we sailed down the coast to the Channel Islands and down to Mexico just a touch, to the Todos Santos Islands. We went up to Tomales Bay, and we'd go up the river and the delta during the summer. And during that time I used to read Beebe. [William Beebe was a pioneer of deep-sea exploration of the 1930s.] And what I wanted to do was become an ichthyologist. I used to tell people that when I was a little girl, and they would laugh. Anyway, I soon gave up on that.

C&O: Why?

Libby: I remember my brother once said, when I said I wanted to be an ichthyologist—I was ten or eleven—”You're not going to be that.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You know what you're going to do when you grow up?” And I said, “What?” He said, “You're going to get married and you're going to have children.” And I thought, “By golly, he's probably . . . “ He said, “That's what all women do, that's what all girls do,” and he said, “That'll happen to you.” And he was right, obviously. [Libby married at age 25, and had 3 daughters.] But then I went into anthropology and I banged around in that for quite a while. And then when [husband] Ted died, I remember one of my close friends said, “Have you ever thought of going back to school and going into what you always wanted to do, ichthyology?” But of course I didn't. But then [in 1975] I met Lovell—somebody who was a diver and who was interested in those sorts of things.

C&O: So Lovell, how did you get into diving?

Lovell: Well, I used to like backpacking and river touring and ski touring and all of that. And I carried a camera and took snapshots. And then I became aware that there was a marine environment, and people were taking pictures that electrified me to see what was down there. So I got into diving.

C&O: When?

Lovell: I think it was in the 1950s. And at that time, diving was new—sports diving, regulators and wet suits, and all of that. Also new were enclosures for cameras. The first one that I became aware of was something called a Rolleimarin, and it was a beautiful big enclosure that was designed in Germany by Hans Hass for a twin-lens Rollei. So I got into diving and immediately got that.

In those days I was still practicing medicine, and diving meant coming down to Monterey a couple of weekends a year and going out on a chartered boat with some of my diving buddies. We'd go out on the Bottom Scratcher or Sand Dollar—those were dive boats out of San Diego—or go out of Santa Barbara and dive the Channel Islands, and I’d be shooting with the Rollei. I feel some of my best images were taken with that set-up, the two-and-a-quarter format. But when Lib and I got into diving here, visibility often was not good, and we got interested in little things beyond the capability of the twin-lens Rollei. That's when I went to a Nikon with an enclosure.

C&O: And when was that?

Lovell: In 1980. That's when we really got into diving. Well, then all these doors opened to us, these incredible opportunities. One of them was at the Hopkins Subtidal Ecology course. There were 30 students in the class—28 undergraduates from Stanford and the two of us. It was a five-week summer course. We dove every day except Saturday and Sunday, we had two hours of lecture a day, and we had lab. We had to be in our wet suits at eight o'clock every morning, and we went until about six in the afternoon. And we'd go home and we'd be too tired to eat dinner, so we'd have a bowl of corn flakes and crash because we had to be up at six o'clock the next morning!

Libby: Yes, because you had to be down at Hopkins at about seven, seven thirty, to pull on your wet wet suit. And I always thought because we were the oldest in the class, the least we could do was to always be there on time, you know, not drag everybody back because we're late.

Lovell: And we dove every reef on the Peninsula, from Partington Cove to the shale beds here, and that really built our confidence.

C&O: And Libby, you had been a photographer already?

Libby: No. Well, you know, snapshots. But no, I hadn't done photography. And then Lovell got me this Nikonos, mostly because if you dive with a photographer, you spend an awful lot of time just sitting there waiting while he's fiddling around. And underwater you get colder and colder just sitting there, and you want to walk around the corner, but you're supposed to be with your buddy. Of course, many times we didn’t stick together the way you should.

Lovell: Oh, we'd separate and split all the time.

Libby: Right, and the minute you lose your partner you're supposed to go up to the surface if you can't find them.

Lovell: We never did.

Libby: Well, we'd lose ourselves at the beginning of a dive and not look around until we hit the surface half an hour later.

Lovell: Once we were diving in Peleliu, the northern part of Palau, where there are a lot of gray reef sharks. I was down on this wall, probably down around sixty feet, looking at little tiny things with my nose buried in the reef, and there were a bunch of these sharks milling around in back of me. And Lib sat there and watched for a while, and she finally split . . .

Libby: I kept poking him and everyone else had gone up.

Lovell: . . . She went up to the surface and waited for me to finish getting my little pictures.

Libby: Well, I just went on top of the reef, I could still see him. Anyway, I think that's why he got me the Nikonos, because it gave me something to do. And then I got into it.

Libby: Well, I had extension tubes, so I could get two-to-one magnification right on the spot. And I had a 15mm lens, for wide-angle stuff. So I could take all those big kelp forest shots. Lovell used to stick more to the medium range. So the very very small and the very very big would be mine.

Lovell: Although I could put a teleconverter on a macro lens, which allowed me to preserve working distance and get the strobes in. Whereas if you use a lens that has to focus very closely, you can't get the illumination in.

Libby: Of course, then we got involved in bringing things in and photographing them in the lab.

C&O: And how did you set that lab up?

Libby: Well, first we had it at Hopkins; one building had small labs in it for visiting professors or students. We had one of those, with running seawater and aquaria.

Lovell: We could keep our animals and study them.

Libby: There was a refrigerator out in the hall, so you could keep your animals cold all night. And so we would do the collecting and keep the animals in the aquaria and take their pictures. Well, then when they got some new professors, they gutted that whole lab and we were out, and that was very sad. But then we took pictures in our darkroom, and we'd bring jars of saltwater home; you could keep the animals for three, maybe four days. We had a bubbler, and we'd add fresh saltwater every so often.

Lovell: Then [Moss Landing Marine Lab instructor] Jim Nybakken turned us on to the Olympus system for macro-photography, in which you have a stand and enlarging lenses and bellows, and we could get up to 14 times enlarged. That set-up enabled us to get pictures of [the encrusting bryozoan] Membranipora spawning, and that sort of thing. And that opened up a whole new world to us. For quite a while we were interested in organisms that encrust the blades of kelp—they're on a flat substratum, so you don't have to deal with depth-of-field problems. If you have little tiny things on a flat surface, that lends itself to magnification. Whereas if they were crawling around on some upright structure, then you'd have much more trouble photographing them. So for many years we'd go out in our Zodiac and collect blades of kelp and bring them back to the lab, and then we'd look at all the things that live on them. They play an important role in our book.

C&O: So you'd study them through a microscope and find interesting things that you hoped to capture on film.

Libby: Yes, we'd bring blobs of stuff—a piece of substrate or a bunch of algae—and spend hours looking at that through a dissecting scope. Because as you'd poke along, more little creatures would poke their heads out. It was just fantastic.

Lovell: Little tiny tube worms sticking their noses out, and little tiny amphi-pods crawling around. It's just incredible what you'd find, it's a whole world.

Libby: You could spend all day just looking.

C&O: So your world went from the very big scale down to the very small scale.

Lovell: Both.

Libby: People take photographs through microscopes, and then they have electron microscopy, but what we took was about 14 times magnification, and no one has touched that.

C&O: That's your own unique niche.

Libby: Yes, this 14 times is sort of an “in between.”

C&O: Did you have specific photogra-phic projects that you'd be working on?

Libby: Sometimes. Often we'd just see what we could find. For a while we were shooting Epiactis [proliferating anemone] over in a channel between Whalers and Bluefish Coves [at Point Lobos], 30 feet deep.

Lovell: You can only get over there when it's quiet, so we'd look out the window of our home, and if it was quiet, we'd put the Zodiac on the car and chase down to Whalers.

Libby: Once we were looking for a nudibranch that feeds on Epiactis. And one time we found it, and took a few pictures, and then we ran out of film. So I had in the pocket of my BC [buoyancy compensator vest] this red ribbon, an old Christmas ribbon, and I tied it on this piece of kelp so we could find it again. We had to go all the way home to get more film, and came back and looked for the red ribbon.

C&O: And was the nudibranch still there?

Libby: Oh, yes. So we got some pictures of that, which was good. And then once we were going after Crepidula, the little slipper snail that rides along on another snail. Well, then we looked for those and took pictures madly.

Lovell: Over years we did that. We learned about these things in that subtidal course, and so whenever we got interested, we'd keep shooting those animals.

Libby: Then we spent a lot of time collecting that kelp curler that makes little nests in the tops of kelp. We'd go out in our inflatable and hunt around in the canopy and open the curled-over kelp blades up a little bit, and if there was somebody inside we'd close it up and bring it home, then open it where we could take the picture.

Lovell: That got us into publishing for the first time: we had two articles in Natural History, one on Epiactis and one on Crepidula. That was a big breakthrough for us.

C&O: Is there anything you'd like to say about the changes you've noticed, as far as diving goes, along the California coast?

Libby: The only thing we really noticed was that there aren't as many fish locally. We used to see lots of big lings and big cabezons, and even leopard sharks, even though you couldn't get close enough to get their pictures. And the last few years you just didn't see those things around.

Lovell: Our memory was that early on, when you'd dive along the coast here there'd be rockfish, fish in almost all the little cracks, some of them moderate-sized fish. Now you don't see that. And it made us strong supporters to the idea of having that no-take zone, but that got shot down. [In 1997 the Edward Ricketts Underwater Park was formally established by the City of Monterey. A no-take provision was watered down in the end: fishing is presently permitted, as is kelp harvesting. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has imposed a voluntary prohibition on collecting in the park in keeping with the spirit of the no-take concept.]

One thing we haven't covered yet is how wonderful it was for us to acquire that little ten-foot Zodiac. If it was a reasonably calm day we could put that thing on the top of the car and put our junk in the back and off we'd go, the two of us on our own. Fortunately, we didn't have enough power and size to take us up and down the open coast, because I'm sure we would've drowned ourselves if we'd tried doing that. But we did do things like launch at Whalers and cross Carmel Bay over to Pescadero Point, which is very, very interesting; it's a little deeper to see interesting things there, down around 80, 90 feet. Then we'd go from the [Monterey] breakwater out as far as Point Pinos. We dove those areas repeatedly in that little Zodiac, and that was just wonderful.

C&O: Do you have any particularly memorable dives that you still talk about?

Libby: Well, there’s the one when Lovell's weight belt came off.

C&O: What happened?

Libby: We were out at the Pinnacles [in the open ocean off Pebble Beach]. The top of the Pinnacles is at about 80 feet, and then it drops off suddenly on both sides to 120 or so, and on down. And I was puttering around, when all of a sudden here comes Lovell tearing down, with his weight belt in one hand, going shhhhh, down to the bottom. And I reached out, because he had his camera in the other hand, and I was going to take his camera, at least, so he'd have two hands. But he went tearing on down past me, so I went tearing down after him of course, and thank heavens, he landed on a flat spot rather than going on down.

Lovell: I got my weight belt back on.

Libby: Yeah, he hit the bottom and sort of stretched out on his stomach with his weight belt, and I sort of sat on his back to hold him down while he got it hooked up.

Lovell: I was short of breath from the struggle.

C&O: How did it come off?

Lovell: Well, it was one of those buckles. We got rid of that in a hurry. We got one of those rubber things that are a clasp, and they never come off. I never, ever, would dive with one of those buckles again.

Lovell: I think some of the dives in the Indo-Pacific were fantastic.

C&O: For the animal life that you saw?

Libby: The animal life and the beauty of it.

Lovell: But they were hairier dives, a lot of them, because of the current. Terrific current.

Libby: Only once have we had that current here, and that was out at North Point [the outer point of Point Lobos]. I should have realized, because we'd always hang our cameras off a lanyard from the boat, and then you'd drop in and pick up your camera and take it on down. And I remember seeing Lovell's camera out over here, you know, not down there. I thought, yes, quite a bit of current, but it didn't occur to me that maybe we shouldn't go in.

Lovell: Well, we learned finally that if the kelp bed isn't there, don't go in the water, because the kelp is lying flat on the bottom.

Lovell: You learn a lot when you dive. Little experiences all the way along. About the power of the ocean. It's bigger than we are, and that's the first thing you learn.