by Hope Cruz

Bella Zandoná is used to cold water. Antarctica is different.

For a brief moment, everything feels exactly right. Bella looks out across the vast Antarctic landscape, ice and deep blue water stretching in every direction. The bright pink accents of her dry suit stand out against the deep blues and whites around her. Then she rolls backward off the zodiac and into the water, her Canon R6 sealed inside a Marelux underwater housing, Marelux Apollo III strobes extending from either side of the rig while a wide-angle lens waits to capture the vast world beneath the ice.

Bella knows something is wrong the moment she enters.

A sudden sharp cold rushes around her right hand. The shock is immediate. Freezing water is flooding into her glove, and the cold hits hard, like plunging her hand straight into a bowl of ice water.

For a moment she considers ending the dive, but instead she keeps going.

Around her stretches a dive site no one has explored before. The guides had deliberately brought the team to an uncharted stretch of Antarctic water where, as far as anyone knew, no diver had ever descended. The thought had been buzzing in Bella’s mind since she woke that morning, adrenaline building with every piece of gear she checked and every strap she tightened on the zodiac ride to the site.

The pain settles into a deep ache as the cold pushes through the glove. She flexes her fingers inside the thick insulation, testing camera controls. Her trigger finger still responds.

The cold burns through, but she pushes the thought aside and keeps diving. Adrenaline drives her, along with the quiet pressure to prove to herself that she belongs there.

Ten minutes into the dive, her hand goes numb, but she can still use it. She presses the shutter and the strobes fire. Bella keeps shooting into the vast blue water beneath the ice.

Determination pushes her forward as her mind begins quietly negotiating with the warning signals coming from her body.

You’re fine. Keep going. Don’t waste this moment.

Twenty minutes in, she can’t feel her hand at all.

It’s time to ascend.

She breaks the surface and climbs back onto the zodiac. At first, there’s only cold. Then circulation begins to return as her right hand warms. It has turned a deep purple, and waves of pins and needles surge through her fingers, so intense that she pulls it tight against her chest, trying not to panic as feeling slowly returns.

Later, Bella can only speculate about the cause. The extreme cold may have caused the glove seals to shrink, allowing Antarctic water to seep inside. Whatever the reason, the result is mild frostbite concentrated in her right trigger finger, the one she uses to press the camera shutter, and the pain lingers throughout the expedition.

Antarctica had made its point. Bella was no stranger to cold water, but conditions here were harsher and far less forgiving than anything she had experienced before. On her second dive, both gloves unexpectedly flooded. This time she didn’t push through it, and the dive lasted only a few minutes before she surfaced.

Antarctica has a way of humbling even experienced divers, and this lesson came early for Bella. The resilience that carried her into those icy waters was forged in the cold Pacific waters of the Pacific Northwest, where she still dives regularly.

Bella learned to dive in Seattle, where the Pacific can feel unforgiving enough. Temperatures hover in the low 50s, visibility can shrink to just a few feet, and divers move slowly through dark water searching for life hidden among kelp forests and rocky seafloor. For many divers, those conditions are already intimidating. For Bella, they eventually became routine.

She learned to layer into a dry suit, shoulder heavy tanks and camera gear, and descend into the cold Pacific again and again, building the experience and resilience that would eventually define her work as an underwater photographer. That experience prepared her well, but Antarctica takes cold to an entirely different level.

Even through the extra layers beneath her dry suit, Antarctic water pressed in with a severity she had never felt in Seattle or anywhere else she had dived. Temperatures hovered between –1 and –3°C, cold enough to freeze solid if not for the ocean’s salt holding it in liquid form.

At 24, Bella has already developed the skills that made the Antarctica expedition possible. As a marine biologist and underwater photographer, she has spent years working in cold Pacific waters and documenting marine life across dive sites around the world. Her work has taken her far beyond Seattle, from the kelp forests of the Pacific Northwest to tropical dive sites across the Caribbean, Mexico, Honduras, Hawaii, Bali, and beyond. Each trip brought new environments, new species, and new challenges, expanding the experience she carried into every dive.

Bella's macro underwater photography

That growing body of work helped her earn a $10,000 grant through Blue Green Expeditions, part of an $80,000 fund established by an anonymous donor supporting artists and researchers traveling to Antarctica.

The opportunity would take Bella thousands of miles south, and the journey there would test her long before she ever entered the water. To reach the continent, Bella crossed the Drake Passage, a 600-mile stretch of ocean between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula known for some of the roughest seas on Earth. During the crossing, the expedition ship Ortelius rolled and plunged through swells reaching 35 to 40 feet.

Inside the vessel, the motion never stopped. Bella gripped the railings as she moved down the narrow stairwells toward her cabin, the ship rolling hard beneath her feet. Seasickness bags lined the stairwells, a reminder of the Drake Passage’s notorious conditions. The stairwells had no windows, leaving her without a horizon to steady herself against as the ship continued to roll violently.

The cabins themselves did have windows, but when the largest swells were expected the crew hammered them shut, leaving Bella to endure the sea’s powerful, relentless motion in uneasy, nauseating, and claustrophobic conditions.

During one particularly rough stretch, the thought surfaced: her camera gear.

Every piece of equipment she brought had to survive the journey south before she could even think about photographing the world waiting beneath Antarctic ice. Her camera bodies, lenses, underwater housing, and strobes represented years of work and investment.

Before leaving Seattle, Bella packed her kit carefully. Two Canon R6 bodies, the lenses she relied on for both topside and underwater work, her Marelux housing, and the strobes that would restore color beneath Antarctic water all had to travel safely to the bottom of the world.

Her gear was split between two Think Tank bags, an Airport Security V3 roller and a FocusPoint 30L RollTop backpack. The Airport Security V3 carried the heavier underwater equipment, including the housing body, dome port, strobes, and a collection of smaller accessories essential for working beneath the surface.

Her FocusPoint Rolltop stayed with her as a personal item on flights. Inside the camera compartment she packed both R6 bodies, her 15-30mm and 70-200mm lenses, along with batteries and memory cards. The top compartment carried travel essentials such as her laptop, chargers, and toiletries, while the front pocket held passports and documents.

Together, the two bags kept everything protected, organized, and within reach through flights, transfers, and the rough journey south. As the ship rolled through turbulent swells, Bella took comfort in knowing her gear was secure.

With every mile closer to Antarctica, the pressure grew. Reaching the continent is rare, and photographing it even rarer. For most photographers, Antarctica is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and Bella knew that. Expeditions are expensive, access is limited, and weather dictates everything. Even once you arrive, there is no guarantee a dive will happen or that the moment you imagined will ever appear.

One thought kept circling her mind: What if I never get to do this again?

That pressure followed Bella throughout the expedition, though years earlier a very different feeling had marked her first open-water certification dive in Seattle in 2018.

Bella remembers how nervous she felt. She trained in August, when conditions in the Pacific Northwest can be brutal. The water was cold, and visibility dropped to just two or three feet, so poor that divers could barely see one another and instructors seemed to suddenly materialize out of the murky water, startling students as they appeared inches from their masks.

Bella held onto the training line running down into the water, waiting her turn while instructors moved from diver to diver. Cold and nervous, she tried not to think about the dark water surrounding her.

Then something serendipitously drifted into view.

A small white jellyfish floated past her shoulder, about the size of her hand, pulsing gently through the green water. Mesmerized, Bella watched it drift beside her, and for a moment its quiet presence felt almost like a small angel moving through the darkness, quelling her fear.

Seattle jellyfish

“It brought me so much peace,” she said. “I felt a wave go through me. I realized I was supposed to be here.” In that moment, her nerves dissolved into a realization that would shape the career she would continue building underwater.

Becoming an underwater photographer, however, would take time.

In the years that followed, Bella returned to the water again and again, slowly building the skills that would shape her career. Cold-water diving in the Pacific Northwest demands patience and resilience. Gear is heavy, currents can push hard enough that divers sometimes kick furiously just to hold position, and visibility can collapse within a few feet.

Over time, that discomfort became part of the training. Bella learned that the only way to grow comfortable in cold, unpredictable water was simply to keep showing up.

“You have to be there,” she said.

Preparation became routine. Layering into a dry suit, assembling tanks and regulators, and preparing a camera system built to withstand the pressure of the ocean could take longer than the dive itself. Once underwater, conditions demanded constant adjustment.

Week after week, Bella returned to the water, sometimes diving three or four times in a single week, building the muscle memory that allowed her to move calmly through cold currents while managing the growing complexity of her camera system.

At the same time, Bella was studying marine biology in college, learning to observe the ocean not only as a photographer but as a scientist. Understanding animal behavior helped her anticipate moments underwater, recognizing when a creature might move, feed, or pause just long enough for a photograph.

In fields like marine biology and underwater photography, both still largely dominated by men, Bella shows up unapologetically as herself. Her dive gear carries bright pink accents, a cheerful streak of color moving through dark water and cold environments, reflecting the femininity and joy that define her presence underwater.

That same sense of curiosity and individuality shaped the direction of her photography. Bella became drawn to macro photography, focusing on the small and often overlooked creatures that inhabit the ocean floor. She learned to look closely at details many divers swim past, like a wolf eel curled around its nest of eggs, guarding them with unexpected care. Experiences like these deepened Bella’s fascination with the individuality of life beneath the surface.

“It’s important to me that people know the ocean is full of personalities,” Bella said. “From the smallest little critters to the big ones. I want people to see them as individuals.”

Over time, the details many divers overlook became the center of her work. Years of cold-water dives and careful observation sharpened both her patience and her instincts underwater. By the time the opportunity to photograph Antarctica appeared, the discipline behind her images had already been built.

Then Antarctica changed the equation.

While much of Bella’s experience had centered on macro subjects that reward patience and stillness, Antarctica operates on a completely different scale. Icebergs descend far below the surface, divers move through open blue water rather than along reefs, and the environment stretches outward in every direction.

Bella understood the landscape would require wide-angle compositions and a different set of instincts. Instead of studying the ocean floor for small subjects, she had to mentally zoom out, anticipating larger, rapidly changing moments. The transition demanded adjustments that had not yet become muscle memory, and thick gloves made it harder to feel the housing’s buttons and dials, and the extreme cold shortened every dive.

“Antarctica humbled me,” she said.

Yet when timing aligned, the scale of the environment produced images unlike anything she had captured before.

Among her favorite images is a photograph of three Adélie penguins standing on a small iceberg. The frame slices through the waterline, separating the snowy Antarctic landscape above from the dark blue ocean below.

Three Adélie penguins standing on an iceberg

Yet one of Bella’s most memorable moments in Antarctica did not involve taking a photograph at all. During one dive she lowered her camera and reached out, her gloved hand touching the surface of an iceberg beneath the water. The ice had formed long before she was born, she thought, and for a moment she simply remained present.

Later in the expedition, participants were invited to take part in something the guides called Antarctic Silence. The zodiacs drifted away from the ship before the engines were shut off completely, and for ten or fifteen minutes the boats simply floated.

No engines.

No voices.

Only Antarctica.

The ship sat far in the distance while the surrounding landscape settled into a rare and complete stillness. For Bella, the moment felt almost meditative, a pause in the middle of an expedition defined by movement, weather, and the constant awareness that every opportunity here was fleeting.

Photo: Christian Dimitrius

In that quiet, something became very clear to her.

Bella believes part of her role as a photographer is to share places like Antarctica with people who may never have the chance to see them for themselves.

“I want it to be a huge part of my life,” she said. “I have the means to capture amazing photos and bring them back to people who might never be able to go there. I want to show everyone what’s there, because it’s so remote.”

Still, the same question kept returning.

What if I never get to do this again?

Bella admits it was a thought she wrestled with constantly during the expedition.

“It’s hard to let go and just be there,” she said. “You feel that pressure not to miss anything.”

She didn’t miss anything. What Antarctica ultimately taught her was that the moments she was searching for were already there. She simply had to be present enough to recognize them.

Camera or no camera, she met those moments with the patience she built through years of cold-water diving, the curiosity that first anchored her beneath the Pacific, and the presence Antarctica itself demanded.

Even the small details that mark her presence underwater moved steadily through the vast blue. The pink accents along her dive gear moved through Antarctica’s deep blue water just as they do in the cold Pacific waters of Seattle, a quiet reflection of the individuality and determination she brings into environments where few women work.

Photo: Christian Dimitrius

What Bella carried home was more than a collection of photographs. She returned with sharper instincts, renewed confidence, and a stronger sense of purpose. Antarctica may have humbled her, but it also confirmed something she had already begun to understand.

Wherever the ocean takes her next, Bella will meet it prepared, patient, and fully present when the moment arrives.

Just like years earlier in the cold waters of Seattle, Bella had already put it simply.

“You have to be there.”