About the Videographer

My name is Mike Boom. I shoot underwater video for Laughing Eel Productions.

I'm also a writer, 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: Salesforce, Sony Computer Entertainment (PlayStation stuff), Adobe, PayPal, 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. My first reaction was "You mean I have to experience all my dives now through this crappy little video screen?" I must have found something compelling about it, though, since I've been shooting around the world since then and have steadily turned out short videos to share with friends, enemies, and total strangers.

In early 2008 I worked for four months as the underwater video pro on the live-aboard dive boat Nai'a. On my first charter we hit the tail end of a hurricane, my underwater housing poured out smoke when I first put everything together, I flooded my dive computer and broke a mask, cracked a rib, and had an editing computer that crashed into the blue screen of death at least once every other hour. Despite all that I had a great time, managed to shoot some decent video, and learned to put out a 23-minute trip video once a week come hell or high water.

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

I'm now back at work in California, shooting and making more videos. 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 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.

All content copyright 2001-2014, Michael Boom.