A childhood as a Navy brat took Kip F. Evans all over the world with his family, including a consequential trip to Polynesia where he went snorkeling with his brother and dad and saw a reef for the first time. That trip clinched his affection for the ocean. He got certified to scuba dive at 16 and continued to develop his technical skill as he pursued science before photography.
He earned a degree in environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara, then became a research diver in the Channel Islands, spending hundreds of hours underwater surveying species.
His evolution as a photographer started more incidentally. As a teen diving, he remembers that his dad (a hobbyist photographer) would run out of air first and return to the surface; he would leave his underwater camera behind with his sons. “I had a lot of early success with it, and it inspired me,” Evans says…