Paul Cater Deaton’s still photography, video and underwater photography have taken him around the globe. Photo by Stuart Villanueva

Cinematographer chases adventures beneath the sea

Paul Cater Deaton fell in love with underwater photography when he was a small boy growing up on a West Texas ranch, he said.

Watching classic television series like “Sea Hunt,” Deaton saw a diver spit into his mask to clear it, then tried the same trick in the ranch’s livestock tank, he said.

With the hulking wreck of USS Kittiwake as a backdrop, Paul Cater Deaton films as Aggressor Fleet pioneer Wayne Hasson and venerable underwater filmmaker Stan Waterman return to the dive boat at the conclusion of Waterman’s final dive. At the age of 90, the man who Deaton terms “the Obi-Wan to my Luke” hung up his fins after a career of more than a half century of making films undersea. Deaton’s “The Last Hurrah” chronicled the expedition, which launched the day after Waterman’s 90th birthday. Photo by Alan Robertson

From there, he has never looked back on a life spent chasing treasures hidden beneath the sea.

Just more than a year ago, Deaton and his wife, producer and photographer Monica Gephart, made a historic, high-ceilinged apartment on Ball Street in Galveston their new home after a hurricane tore through St. Thomas, their island home for 19 years.

“Our house on St. Thomas was basically destroyed,” Deaton said.

Life in the Caribbean had been good to him, providing a steady stream of commercial underwater work and a stint on the reality television series “The Amazing Race,” filming competitors plunging into the water from a famous rock promontory in search of messages in a bottle. One of Deaton’s tasks was to capture classic splashes as jumpers hit the water.

A diving journalist by trade, Deaton loves putting together music, narration and photography in films he shoots and edits, he said. One of them, “Finding Nemo’s Garden,” filmed in Italy, was screened at Galveston College in late March.

Croatia’s close ties to the sea are evident in the harbor of the picturesque town of Vela Luka. This was one of the locations for Paul Cater Deaton’s “Wine Diving in Croatia” documentary. Photo by Paul Cater Deaton

“I saw a story in a food and wine magazine about an Italian fellow about my age who grew up on the Ligurian Sea south of Genoa,” Deaton said.

The subject of his film wanted to grow herbs, vegetables and flowers underwater in temperature-controlled biodomes anchored to the sea floor.

“The domes function like terrariums,” Deaton said. They are a dive attraction in Italy, but for Deaton represented an underwater story like others he has shot about people doing unexpected things in watery worlds.

At the conclusion of a successful shoot for The Discovery Channel, an exuberant Paul Cater Deaton emerges from the Caribbean waters of his former home in the Virgin Islands. Deaton also has filmed for Animal Planet, HBO Documentaries, “The Amazing Race” and many others. Photo by Monica Gephart

In another of his films, “Wine Diving in Croatia,” Deaton followed a group of restaurant entrepreneurs bottling and aging wine underwater in amphoras — tall, oval-shaped, two-handled stone vases fashioned by the ancient Greeks to store olive oil.

In February, he went ice diving in a rock quarry in Wisconsin, checking out the rock strata from decades of mining operations from a unique underwater perspective.

“The main reason I did it is if someone who does films in Antarctica needs a camera man, I’m qualified for the job,” Deaton said. Wearing a special dry suit over undergarments, he had to learn the skills of buoyancy compensation and cold tolerance, and got to enjoy the sight of wondrous shafts of light through ice, a photographer’s dream, he said.

Noted oceanographer Jean-Michel Cousteau, seminal underwater filmmaker Stan Waterman and Paul Cater Deaton take a moment to catch up at the Beneath the Sea diving and travel exposition. The expo and film festival are among the biggest and most prestigious in the world. Photo by Richard Morris

The Deaton home is filled with enlarged photos of his favorite water spots — a Solomon Islands farmers market, its merchants crowded by tropical fruits in side-by-side canoes, shot from above; Dubrovnik with its terra cotta roofs and blue water, shot from a distant hillside; and the Red Sea where he experienced his most memorable dive in 2001, just shortly after the 9/11 attacks in New York City, looking for a wrecked ship in clear, still waters.

“We were far away from land, so there was no river silt,” Deaton said. “The water was so clear it was almost like vodka.”

Sanja Jeic, of Barbara Dive Center, shows amphorae containing wines crafted by Edivo Vina. In addition to conventional cellars, vintners Edi Bajurin and Ivo Segovic age many of their wines underwater, where constant temperatures are ideal for bringing out the best in their wines. Photo by Paul Cater Deaton

In an area known as “Tiger Beach,” some 25 miles off Grand Bahama, Paul Cater Deaton has a tête-à-tête with a majestic tiger shark. In open water, without cages, Deaton joined famed underwater cinematographer Joe Romeiro and others, filming a dozen tigers, ranging from 7 to 16 feet in length. Deaton’s “Showdown at Tiger Beach” went on to be an official selection at 12 international film festivals, winning Best Documentary Short at two of them. Photo by Gregory B. Holmes

To see some of Deaton’s work and learn more, visit www.paulcaterdeaton.com.