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scene there was just coming to life. Mike Portelly and
others were shooting movies and stills in local pools,
generating enough work to keep an assistant occupied.
She found opportunity and inspiration to develop a
portfolio of her own work, which led to a two-month
gig shooting in Uruguay for National Geographic.
In 2002 Holloway traveled to Ibiza, Spain, to
photograph the UK freedive team. During the shoot
she found communication with the divers difficult and
had to repeatedly swim to the surface to tell them what
she was looking for. Although she was never deeper
than 33 feet, it was a long day of zig-zag profiles and no
safety stops. After the shoot she had some symptoms
that made her very concerned about decompression
sickness (DCS). She drank some water and took some
aspirin (not what DAN® would recommend), and
fortunately her symptoms subsided. But in the course
of that health scare she discovered she was pregnant.
Her panic and subsequent research about the potential
effects on her unborn child led to the realization that
DCS could be dangerous to a developing fetus. Happily,
her daughter was a normal, healthy child, and Holloway
continued on with a career that involved both open-
ocean photography and many more pool photo sessions
commissioned to bring to life art directors’ visions.
Her expertise in the pool was refined in a rather
humble way. From 2005 through 2009 she conducted
annual “bread-and-butter” tours of the USA, visiting
seven cities in two weeks, shooting underwater portraits
of up to 50 babies a day. While business was good at
the start, advancing digital technology and increasingly
accessible underwater cameras took away the novelty of
what she offered, and demand for her work diminished.
From there Holloway’s career turned to a more
stylized and commercial genre, involving work with
art directors, stylists and talented models all working
together to create vibrant underwater sets. Today she
is one of the most creative and in-demand producers
of underwater fantasy images in both stills and video.
Her client list includes Nike, Speedo, Umbro, Sony,
Jacuzzi as well as publications such as GQ, Observer
Magazine and How To Spend It. Based in London, she
lives with her husband and their three young children,
Brooke, Willow and Woody.
In deference to her need to shoot both high-quality
stills and 4K video, her primary underwater system
is a Canon EOS-1D C in a Seacam housing. Her
lighting systems include Ikelite strobes underwater
and a variety of studio lights above the surface as
dictated by the set and the concept. She does much
of the postproduction work herself but often prefers
to take images only as far as rough concepts before
turning them over to a digital artist for the refinements
necessary to make them finished pieces of art.
Read along as Holloway tells the stories behind some
of her images.
Holloway at work in New Providence, Bahamas, with Stuart
Cove’s shark wranglers and safety divers
Previous spread: “This image was shot in the underwater
stage at Pinewood Studios in the UK, the same tank used to
film the underwater stunts for Mission: Impossible — Rogue
Nation as well as for several James Bond movies. I was lucky
enough to get a commission to shoot there for 125 magazine,
and the 3D Agency in London created this stunning jellyfish
to go with the futuristic theme of the shoot. The orb behind
the model is a powerful light in the background. The exquisite
styling was by Harris Elliot ), and this
editorial shot led directly to a booking for a large campaign
for Rosemount wines.”
PIA VENEGAS