Audrey Garbacik

Audrey Garbacik is intrigued by the magic of creatures deep and tiny. The ocean holds a universe of astounding variety and beauty revealed through the work of a diver who is also a macro-specialist photographer who is also an artist painting with light. That’s her passion. Ms. Garbacik has dived over much of the world in pursuit of her art. A resident of the San Juan Islands, most of her work is from the Salish Sea but she has dived Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and Osprey Reef, Iceland, Baja California,the Channel Islands, Thailand, the Philippines, Fiji, the Carribean Sea and the Galapagos and is travelling soon to Antarctica, Tasmania and Southern Australia.

Her challenge is finding her subjects in the sea’s vastness. “Sometimes, I can’t actually see them, but I know what they live on,” says Ms. Garbacik who battles buoyancy, currents, the motion of her breathing, “back-scatter” and haze in the water to capture these astounding images, printed on a metal medium to best emphasize her subject’s fine detail. Her main camera is an OM-D E-M1. “I was surprised at first by the interest in my photography,” says Garbacik. “When children see them and flood me with questions or when someone sees them and learns something new, it makes my day”.

Ms. Garbacik is married with two sons and a husband of 42 years, Dennis, who prodded her into underwater photography because he wanted to see the wonders she was describing. She is an avid cyclist. A handlebar GoPro camera introduced her to photography. This is her second career. A trained electrical engineer, she became a BIOS engineer, debugging microprocessors for Intel. She owes her success she says to “persistent curiosity” and the mentoring of friend and pro photographer Richard Salas.