About the Videographer

My name is Mike Boom. I shoot underwater video.

I'm a writer by trade, and I run my own business as head honcho of GeekSpeak, a tech writing company in Oakland, California. My client list includes computer companies large and small, thriving and defunct: Sony Computer Entertainment (PlayStation stuff), Adobe, Sun Microsystems, SGI, Commodore-Amiga, and a slew of small start-up companies with various records of success and failure. I also write material at times for underwater camera housing manufacturers Gates Housings and Sea & Sea.

In my distant past I used to write computer how-to books published by Microsoft Press and Random House. In an even more distant past I made my living as a classical oboist, free-lancing around Los Angeles with occasional gigs in the L.A. Chamber Orchestra, Long Beach Symphony, Pasadena Symphony, and a very light frosting of studio jobs.

I started shooting underwater video in the fall of 2001, and have been turning out short videos slowly since then. I'm enraptured with trying to cram underwater sights through the lens of a camcorder, even when the water's cold, my equipment is acting up, and I'd like to drop the whole business into a deep abyss.

The videographer, enraptured with the tail end of a lobster.*

If you're reading this and would like to pay me large sums of money to spend more time underwater and less time in front of a computer, please click . Until that time, I'll continue turning out amateur productions that I'm happy to show and explain at dive club meetings, video seminars, ichthyological soirees, sea slug slumber parties, naturist -- uh, naturalist -- get-downs, birthdays, and bar mitzvahs. Click if you're interested. I'm not wearing the clown make-up anymore, though.

* No animals were harmed in the making of this picture. The lobster has long since vacated this shucked shell. The videographer, however, is under treatment for mental exhaustion. Photo courtesy of Lynn Morton.