DIVER
BARRY FACKLER

I have lived on the Kona Coast of the Big Island, Hawai'i since 2000 and this is where I have done most of my diving. My wife and I moved here from Tucson, AZ after our kids grew up and moved out. Prior to that, our diving had been in the Carribean, Florida Keys, and Sea of Cortez. All of that was long before underwater digital photography came into being, so my photos from those days are very limited.

Kona has wonderful diving right from shore and that is our preferred diving method. Our favorite dive site is Honaunau Bay which is around a 15 minute drive from our home. The beach is mostly lava rock, so there is not much sand to obscure visibility.Because our islands are the tops of volcanoes, the drop-off is quite steep and we often see big animals close to shore. My wife and I have been on many dives with spinner dolphins.manta and eagle rays, various sharks and, on rare occasion, Hawaiian monk seals.

There is a fair amount of small, benthic life here as well. We have only hard corals and they have taken a bit of a beating from some of our recent unusually warm summer water temperatures. However, we continue to have plenty of nudibranchs, octopus, stonefish, frogfish and crustaceans as well as many butterflyfish and wrasse species.

I use only point-and-shoot cameras with limited flexibility in terms of shutter speed, aperature and focus. For that reason I don't consider myself a real photographer, just a guy who likes to take pictures. I like the challenge of finding a good subject, trying to get good composition and waiting for the right moment to release the shutter. Every now and then, I get a good result. I joined this site primarily to share my photos with other divers and to hopefully learn from the experience of others.

As far as other things about me, I will be turning 60 years old this October (2017) and have been married to my wife Betty for 27 years. We have two children (Trevor and Trina) and four grandchildren (TJ, Ashley, Katie and Jacques). I graduated from Northern Arizona University and am a hospital-based physical therapist working primarily with orthopedic and post-stroke rehab.