What level of situational awareness is realistic, and what this means in practice.

[TSandM]

This discussion has reminded me of someone I often think of -- a photographer who was staying at KBR when we were in Indonesia, years ago. This gentleman was well known to the resort, and was always assigned his own guide. He was an avid macro photographer, and his dives went one of two ways. He either ran out of film (yes, this was long enough ago that he was using film) or, quite literally, ran out of gas. His guide was prepared to donate, and the dive would end. He was definitely of the "I'll spend 30 minutes on one subject if I have to, to get THAT shot" kind of photographer. I honestly can't imagine anyone wanting to dive with such a person (and no one did) unless it was on a honest-to-goodness project where the documentation was the entire purpose of the dive.

I have dived with a number of professional photographers, in the sense that they can and do sell their work to magazines and for framing, and none of them has behaved that way.

 

[Deitsch]

Just one more point on "some" photographers
Some divers that are really serious about their shooting, will have no plans to sell their photos...To "market" them.

Many true artists, can not be bothered with what they see as a bourgeois affliction--they do not want to cheapen their ART, by trying to sell it.

I wholeheartedly agree. I've been on numerous underwater photography workshops around the world with both professional underwater photographers as well as serious shooters who may publish images every once in a while, win some contests but aren't planning on making a living from their photography. In nearly every single case, we are all very focused on what we are looking at through the viewfinder. You essentially go in as a buddy team but unless there's some sort of plan (like we're going down to a wreck, setting up our off-camera strobes and taking turns with a specific shot), it's just a given that we are solo diving.

If you try to distract one of these "artists" underwater, with some buddy awareness issue, the typical reaction is their irritation at being interrupted. They dont want you to ruin their pursuit of their art.

True! I remember being quite perturbed once because I was intensely focused on trying to capture a hairy octopus (an extremely rare critter) and someone was bugging me because they found a blue ringed octopus and thought I'd like to capture it. Under normal circumstances I would be thrilled but not when I was in the heat of the moment.