A photographer has re-entered the record books with his happily de-chilled model, following a recent 50m-deep photoshoot – and STEVE HAINING is far from finished yet. He talks to Steve Weinman about the scuba joke that turned technical
What started as a “bit of a joke” during the Covid pandemic has now flowered into a full technical underwater model-shoot dive – and with the support of a Florida tech team, Canadian professional photographer Steve Haining and model Ciara Antoski have firmly established themselves as Guinness World Record-setters.
Also read: Scuba dash across 7 continents brings world record
Their latest Deepest Underwater Model Photoshoot took place on the deck of the Hydro Atlantic shipwreck off Pompano Beach in Florida on 19 December and was verified by GWR last week, on 8 January.
Antoski had been the breath-hold model on Haining’s original and modest 6.4m-deep world-record shoot in 2021. She had not been an experienced enough diver to model on his second record shoot at 30m two years later but her diving, both breath-hold and scuba, has come far since then.
For the latest record US technical diver Wayne Fryman was responsible for keeping Antoski safe and supplied with air, and his name also appears on the GWR commendation.
The new record depth is 49.8m and the overall dive-time was 52min 14sec. To count as a world record photoshoot, GWR now stipulates a minimum bottom time of 15 minutes with full production set-up. Anything less than that is a mere photograph.
For Antoski the December dive was considerably warmer than the previous record shoots had been. Haining and his team had made it tough on the model by using chilling Great Lakes sites, but the terms of the record do not stipulate that dicing with hypothermia is a requirement.
’No need to go deeper’
Steve Haining is not only an underwater shooter but a leading topside professional photographer, cinematographer and film director. He started out photographing rock musicians, athletes and other celebrities before shifting into advertising work and fine-art landscape photography.
The 2021 record had originated during Covid, when he had joked with his team about the possibility of carrying out topside assignments wearing scuba gear to meet Canadian health & safety rules. “Depth was never the original intention of that first record,” he says. “It was more a location I always wanted to explore and photograph – and it happened to be at that depth.”
The location was the WL Wetmore wreck in Lake Huron, but the story gained traction only in the summer of 2023, including on Divernet, which has continued to monitor succeeding attempts to break this arcane but intriguing record.
In November 2023, when the team went almost five times deeper to 30m for half an hour on Lake Huron’s Niagara II wreck, the scantily clad model was professional diver Mareesha Klups, the dive-safety co-ordinator and air-donor from the first shoot. This time Antoski was her modelling mentor.
Afterwards Haining had told Divernet that unless he heard about “an incredible place to shoot at 120ft (36m) or more in much warmer conditions, I don’t think I need to go any deeper!”
But other divers had naturally become interested in contesting the record, and it turns out that Haining had already decided to continue with a more technical approach soon after the Niagara II shoot.
“Ultimately it was: let’s see how far we can push this,” he says. “The first record was kind of an accident but it started this thing where everybody was like: ‘Oh, I could do that!’ When we did the 100ft (30m) one, it seemed like with a lot of the dive community it was a race to the bottom at 130ft (40m).
“There were people diving on air to 130ft (39m) but by the time they got down they were already at their NDL, so they’d shoot for six or seven minutes and bomb back up just to beat the clock.
“We were like, it’s cool that people want to try it but we’ll set the bar a little bit further. We’re always so busy, we’re all travelling, but it was a conversation we’d have.”
The challengers
The Guinness world record was in fact reset to 40.2m in the warmer waters of the Bahamas the month after Haining’s 30m effort, though the dive itself was controversial.
Canadian scuba and freediver Kim Bruneau had teamed up with Chilean photographer Pia Oyarzun to model on breath-hold on the Sea Trader tanker. The wreck’s maximum depth was around 26m but the bow hung out over a drop-off. Most of their time was spent on the wreck, just dipping to 40m for a time to shoot from below it.
Eventually the record was verified – but Guinness clarified its conditions for any future attempts at the same time.
Another bid reported last August on Divernet involved Austrian freediver Christin Gerstorfer and Belgian photographer Filip Blommaert, who chose as their set the Polish enclosed artificial diving facility Deepspot – 45.4m to the bottom in 34°C water. That claim was not validated by GWR.
Haining and his wife Molly have a place in Orlando, Florida, allowing him to reach the coast in an hour to go diving unless he wants to take advantage of the inland cave and springs opportunities. He had hooked up with local dive-school and trimix location Isla Divers, and its team were keen to help him break new ground by staging a model photo-shoot that would involve decompression.
“So I had this group of divers way more experienced than me that have become my buddies. We’re doing negative-entry dives on shipwrecks with a lot of current and stuff, and I started training with them for this shoot.”
Ciara (pronounced Sierra) Antoski soon joined in with this shift to tech. She would normally aim to fit in recreational scuba dives wherever she travelled for her modelling and was already a more advanced diver than she had been in 2021. “She met up with the Isla Divers people and spent several months with them doing her IANTD trimix and extended range and all that stuff.
“So we were already preparing when we saw that this girl in Montreal [Bruneau] had beaten our record. We’re like, we could just go for it right away and push her out but we’ll give it a bit of time.” For all that Haining had said earlier that he was relaxed and welcomed challenges to the record, his competitive instinct had clearly kicked in.
The Hydro Atlantic
As he and Antoski worked towards their IANTD Advanced Recreational Trimix certifications, the team considered the question of location.
“There’s a shipwreck called the Arabia up in the Great Lakes that’s quite deep, so we thought that would be a cool dark one for another challenge,” says Haining. “But then we thought that for all of us in a drysuit or wetsuit the temperature doesn’t really matter until you’re doing your decompression stop, but we’d just be giving the model more pain on top of everything else.
“I started looking at the Florida Keys, but I wanted a wreck that was relatively untouched – and the Hydro Atlantic is a true wreck.” The 90m dredger, built in 1905, had sunk while being towed for salvage in 1987, and lies well north of the Keys off Boca Raton.
“It just happened to be in the right spot. There’s a couple of other deep ones down there but they put you right in the Gulf current, so we picked this one because it looks very nice but was also a safer journey.”
Ray Marciano from Isla Divers would be Haining’s safety diver and was well-equipped to assist with the planning because he knew the Hydro Atlantic so well. “It was the first time in doing these records that I had an expert on the specific dive-site who could really help me,” says Haining.
Marciano would use a rebreather as would another Isla diver Doug Vanderbilt, on stand-by in case Fryman should have to bail out or Haining needed additional support. He would also help set up the assortment of caving torches used as cue lights to bring colour back to Antoski’s skin.
Mareesha Klups, taking a break from film stunt work, would this time be the rescue diver, observing from no-deco depths in case rapid emergency intervention should be needed. Having been both air-supplier and model, she taught Fryman all he needed to know as Antoski’s direct support.
“We did a whole bunch of practice dives for the two weeks leading up to the attempt,” says Haining. Choppy water delayed the photoshoot by a day until 19 December, when he and Marciano did a semi-bounce recon dive in the morning. This was his first time on the Hydro Atlantic.
On the wreck
They tied in on the wreck and set some oxygen tanks on the line. A tiger shark was hanging around, though on the afternoon dive they would see little more than the odd barracuda.
“It was just about getting to see the parts of the structure I’d seen in all the photos,” says Haining. “There were parts of the wreck that had been my first choices but had collapsed, which must have happened just after the hurricane.” This was Hurricane Milton, last October.
The original plan had been to shoot towards the stern with the wheelhouse in the background but it had partially collapsed sideways, leaving a lot of debris. “There wasn’t a spot where I could really put her there, so we went up towards the bow on the port side and that became the main shot, with part of that structure coming up behind her.”
Water temperature was 24°C, which would be balmy for Antoski after 7°C Lake Huron. “When we found the spot on that recon dive I could show her on a picture where we were gonna be – this is the background, my camera’s got this light so be aware, focus on this side of your body because I’ll be shooting this way.
“When we get down she holds the information and already knows how to pose well, which makes it a lot easier for me.”
For the shoot Haining was using a Fujifilm X-H2S camera with a wide-angle lens – “I always shoot wide under water to get more structure in the background” – with Light & Motion lights and an Ikelite as back-up.
Gases were simple enough. “The original plan was to do nitrox 32 to 100ft (30m) and switch to 21/21 for the shoot, then switch on the way back up to have 100% O2 at 20ft (6m), but we ended up just axing the nitrox and going 21/21 the whole way.”
Jelly welcome
The dive started badly for Haining. As he made his negative entry the camband tie on his sidemount broke. As he slung his camera and tried to fix it, a passing jellyfish stung his hand. Vanderbilt saw it all happen and tried to catch up to help, but Haining had everything clipped back together by the time he reached the top of the wreck.
After that, the photoshoot went without a hitch. Antoski was wearing twin aluminum 80s on her back to get up and down and had 7kg of weights on her concealed weightbelt. “It was the perfect amount, because if you watch the video there are times where you can see her lift up on a full breath but the weight still brings her back down. It looks easy but it’s not.”
Haining had planned to move on from the initial location to a second on the other side of the wreck featuring an intact door-frame but after getting the shots he needed he decided against it.
“We had Ciara’s BC really loose with no crotch-strap because she needed to be able to get out of it really fast, so it was do we have to haul that back on again, with her breathing a lot, and guide her over to the other side before having to get all the way back to the middle of the boat where we’d tied off?
“We were going to lose 15 minutes just getting her there and getting set up, so I thought: let’s just keep shooting in this spot.
“We went way beyond the time we needed and Ciara was having a blast. As we were wrapping up you can see her on the video asking: ‘Aren’t we going to the next spot?’
“When she’s told we’re gonna do one more shot before going up she asks: ‘Why did you cancel the dive?’ I don’t think she realised how long she’d been down there.
“The final O2 deco was about 16 minutes and we waited for everyone to clear except Ciara, because she was in the dress and when you’re breathing helium you get cold. So as soon as she cleared, they let her go up.”
Studio in the sky
“In the end, the day felt easy,” says Steve Haining. “It was the first time in history that a photoshoot happened beyond the no-decompression limit – not a photograph but staging lights and having a model without scuba, so that’s really cool.
“The bar is set here and we were the first to push it that far, so it’s great to have a definitive record. It looks like we started a really cool competition.”
So is that it? There is no hesitation: “I’ve talked with Isla Divers about us challenging our own record – I won’t say to what extent but pretty significantly. If somebody else does beat it now that’s awesome because I know how much work it was for us. It was months of planning, even more months of training and practice runs, so they’ll deserve it.”
For the time being, for Haining it’s all about fun-diving in the Florida Keys with the Isla guys, carrying a camera no bigger or more distracting than a GoPro.
But he had also mentioned an ‘altitude’ challenge in the past, and when I enquire it seems that Ciara Antoski is the driving force on this upward trajectory.
Her boyfriend flies a paraglider and she has ambitions to model while hanging off it, with Haining and his camera on a paramotor, and a lighting crew on theirs, setting up a “studio in the sky” to establish the highest model photoshoot record.
“I said that if they could figure it out I’m down and we’ll go for it,” Haining tells me. “Guinness has asked: ‘Are you going to go for the highest as well as the lowest record?’
“I’ll always be down for a challenge but logistically I know about being under water – I don’t know so much about falling out of the sky!”
Also on Divernet: Pushing photo-shoot limits for new world record, World dive record as chilled model poses five times deeper, ‘Mermaids having fun’: Model-dive depth record drops to 40m, World-record dive – to 45m in a warm tube
