Marion Haarsma is a dedicated diver and she always dives with a camera. She started diving in Bonaire, where she visited an old school friend. Soon she got bored and started a diving course. Her teacher was the famous Ibo. She told him she needed a lot of weight. He had to get 3 times out of the water to get enough weight… Then they went to 18 meters on the first dive. By that time she was totally hooked! That same holiday she started by being a model for underwater photographers. But within 2 years, on a holiday in the Maldives, she began filming with super-8 camera.
To improve the editing she became a member of a film club in her hometown, the HAF. The film club asked her members to enter movies in the amateur competitions. To her great surprise ended her films in the highest regions on a national level. So this gave her the courage to enter the Nelos festival in Belgium and later to the English festival in Brighton with a movie about the toads; The Sweet Waterlife. There she won the biggest prize ever given in Europe, the Umel trophy in 1986 together with a Sony video camera, housing, recorder, light and charger with a total value of 10.000 guilders. Famous people had won this prestigious prize before, like Peter Scoones. Never was she so proud… Later she won a Nikonos-V with a fil
m about Ireland (Ierland, mijn eiland), in the Dutch Spondyle festival. This initiated the switch to still photography. For many years she went with 2 sets of cameras under water, still faithful to the filming… But with the rising of the digital filming she changed permanently to still photography. She said: to make a movie is a lot of work and people will only look at it once. A picture you can use for a multitude of applications like a placemat, a mouse pad, to put on a T-shirt, make a photo album, a Christmas card, a poster on the wall, a website and so on, in short: much more fun! Now she is totally into digital photography and working with Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a daily base.
She likes to put her pictures into good use for the protection of the underwater world. During diving holidays, all over the world, she has found many bad environmental circumstances. She would like to inform the public about these ‘mishaps’. Therefore she donates her pictures for educational purposes and to projects about protecting the environment!
For many years she is publishing articles in the magazine (Onderwatersport) of the Dutch Diving Federation (NOB). And recently in the (free) internet diving magazine Wet Web Magazine. Her latest project is the participation of a new website, originated by Andre Crone.
