February Speaker Photographer Barry Kulick

ADVENTURES FROM BEYOND THE WATER

 Photographer Barry Kulick is an honorary member and longtime friend of SFDI.  This February, as he has done in at least 30 Februaries past, Barry will wow us with his photography and regale us with his wit.  Since, due to covid, he has not traveled at all since his last presentation in 2020, he'll show images that he has made in Florida since the beginning of the pandemic, including images of birds and other local terrestrial wildlife.  Club old-timers can also look forward to enjoying some fabulous images from past presentations, while newcomers will savor them for the very first time.  And, he may indeed have a few surprises in store!  Welcome to our friend, Barry!

 ABOUT BARRY KULICK

 Barry Kulick is a professional underwater photographer and cameraman. A long time sport-diver, he sold his guitar making business in 1988, and turned his hobby into a career. During the past decades he has had the opportunity to travel the world with his cameras to capture images of a wide variety of marine subjects; ranging in diversity from minute Pygmy Sea Horses, to enormous Great White Sharks, from the murky confines of ancient shipwrecks, to the vibrant color and ceaseless activity of majestic coral reefs.

 Although his major focus is the realm of still photography, Barry's cinema and video work has been seen in several films, commercials, training videos, and television shows. Hundreds of his still images have appeared throughout North, South and Central America, Europe, and Australia in books, magazines, advertisements, newspapers, postcards, puzzles, posters, computer software, art galleries, corporate and government publications, and private collections.

 Originally from New York City, Barry Kulick and his wife Miriam relocated to Florida in 1992, just in time to be greeted by Hurricane Andrew. Things have remained interesting since then.

January's Wacky Gift Exchange

January’s meeting is our annual wacky gift exchange.
Please bring a wrapped gift. The gift should be comical (wacky) or something nice. Please remember that wacky doesn’t mean junk. Try to bring something that you yourself would be happy to receive.
Wear your holiday finery such as ugly Christmas sweaters and or Santa hats etc. This should make for some great Kodak moments.

November Speaker Chris Gug

Please join SFDI Wednesday, November 2, 2022, as we welcome Chris Gug. Gug will be discussing his recent expedition to Misool in West Papua, Indonesia. He'll show some of the images he shot, some of the techniques he uses and discuss the amazing reef surrounding Misool which is a conservation victory because of the Misool Foundation's passionate effort to make it a no take marine protected area. Gug will be presenting in person!

Chris Gug Bio-Regarded as America's foremost underwater photographer, Gug has been making waves in the art scene for well over a decade. With Chris being the most common name of his generation, "Gug" (pronounced "Goog") has stuck since grade school. And since grade school, he has spent tens of thousands of hours creating marine life images that awe, inspire and sometimes confuse.

With no formal photography education, Gug felt that total immersion into his subject matter was the only way to master the art, and moved to the Caribbean to live on a boat where he could dive and shoot every day for seven years. After a year back in the USA where he exhibited his portfolio, he again took off, craving more exotic subject matter, and landed in Papua New Guinea, where he again lived on a boat, for two years shooting underwater every day. Gug has now created images in over 40 different countries, been published in numerous magazines, and been displayed in several of the world's most prestigious museums. The result has been that his art is now being collected across the world, and the value of his limited edition photographs has seen a steady increase, making them a worthy investment for any art collector.

Based out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he is now able to serve new clients and long-time collectors alike with a fine art gallery dedicated exclusively to his underwater images from around the world.

October Speaker Matt Nicholson

Please join SFDI Wednesday, October 5th, 2022, as we welcome Matt Nicholson, Marine Ecologist and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Sciences. Matt will briefly walk us through some of the highlights of his career in research thus far. Then, he will dive (pun intended) into the work that his current lab group does, including the studies he led during his PhD. Briefly, the main focus is studying the ways in which parasites impact both individual hosts as well as coral reef communities overall. They are a global research group, working in the Caribbean, Australia, Africa, and the Philippines (although his PhD work has “only” taken place in the Caribbean and Australia). He will talk about their main study species (gnathiids), touching on what they are, what they know about them, the studies they are currently working on, and why studying something so small is so important.

Matt was born in Miami, Florida and raised just North of that in Pembroke Pines, Florida. He completed his undergraduate studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, and his master’s degree in England at the University of Exeter. Throughout his career he has been fortunate to have worked in South Africa, Australia, Wales, as well as several Caribbean islands. He has also worked on a wide variety of study species including sharks, fishes, seabirds, jellyfish, and parasites. Matt’s research focuses mainly on foodweb ecology (also termed “trophic ecology”) as well as symbiotic relationships among species.

Simply put, Matt just loves to be blowing bubbles in the ocean. In fact, during field research season (where he dives almost daily) he will often spend his “days off” by going diving. He often says that he couldn’t survive in any other career because nothing else engages his mind and imagination in the same way as research. Also, getting to call the ocean your “office”, and a tank top and boardshorts your “work clothes”, is a sweet deal. In addition to his research, Matt is a big proponent of the “science communication” field, which specifically aims (among other things) to engage non-scientists in ways that are interesting and easily digestible. Since returning to live in Florida in 2021 for the first time in several years, Matt has enjoyed being back “home” and looks forward to beginning a postdoctoral research position here in Miami once he finishes his PhD later this year.