News Archive
This page contains some older news items that I have deleted from the main news page.
May 2009 - Back from the Bahamas
In mid May I travelled to Florida and on to the eastern Bahamas to photograph Oceanic Whitetip Sharks on the Wetpixel and Jim Abernethy Scuba Adventures charter. You can read an informal diary of the trip on the Shear Water here. Before joining the boat I was also able to spend some time photographing the critters at Blue Heron Bridge in the Florida, and you can see a gallery of the critter images and see a video of me on the dive here. The liveaboard also gave me a chance to photograph the swimming pigs of the Exumas, which was a lot of fun, but the main aim was to create a portfolio of Oceanic Whitetip images, which you can see in a gallery here. The weather was not kind, but that did not stop the sharks turning out in large numbers and providing plenty of opportunities for photography. All in all, it was a great trip and many thanks to all on board.
May 2009 - European Maritime Day Exhibition
The European Union used a exhibition of 14 of my underwater photographs as a backdrop to the Conference in Rome for the European Martime Day on the 20th May. The European Maritime Day shows the importance of the sea and oceans for everyday life, both in coastal communities and across Europe as a whole. It also highlights the opportunities and the challenges currently facing maritime regions and sectors: from tourism and fisheries to maritime transport and climate change. Keynote speakers at the event included Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso.
May 2009 - Underwater Studio Shoot
I have long wanted to do an underwater shoot in the controlled conditions of an underwater studio pool and that dream became a reality on a recent trip to the USA, where I was able to join a shoot organised by my friend Jeff Hartog. Pool photography gives you a level of control that is not possible in wildlife photography and the ability to control light in such detail makes it a fascinating process. Shoots like this do not happen without a lot of hard work from a lot of people. I would particularly like to thank Barbee Cain, the make up artist, and the two models Elizabeth and Jamie for working so hard for our images. You can see a gallery of the photographs here.
May 2009 - Back from Lundy
Having taken a bit of break from dive travel, after squeezing in over 100 dives in January and February, I decided to get back to things with a two day trip to Lundy, off the North Devon coast in the UK, to photograph grey seals. The weather was not ideal, but the storms actually acted to concentrate Lundy's seals into the sheltered bays on the lee side of the island and we enjoyed productive and fun encounters. I was joined on this trip by fellow underwater photographers JP Trenque, Dan Bolt and Dan Hopkins and we travelled to Lundy on the Jessica Hettie, operated by Clovelly Charters. Although the conditions were far from perfect the seals more than made up for it and I was able to produce an exciting portfolio of images. You can see a gallery of my grey seal images here.
May 2009 - Announcing Cayman Workshop Jan 2010
I know that 2010 feels a long time away, but it is time to start reserving space in your diaries for my Grand Cayman Workshop between 16th and 23rd January 2010 at Ocean Frontiers, East End, Grand Cayman. THe workshop is themed on lighting: ÒUnderstanding, capturing and controlling both strobe and available light underwaterÓ and is limited to 12 photographers. We will dive on Grand Cayman s dramatic walls, the East End s atmospheric caverns, fishy shallow reefs and at Stingray City. There will be the traditional dawn stingray shoot to photograph the unique stingray schooling behaviour in the perfect light for both colour and black and white images. We will also aim for encounters with larger creatures such as turtles, tarpon and reef sharks. The small group size provides plenty of time for image critique and the event also includes a 1:1 pool session to refine wide angle lighting. The workshop costs $2,175 USD (excluding flights) for 7 nights accommodation at the luxurious Compass Point Resort, workshop, 6 days of diving, social evenings, rental car and high speed Wi-Fi. You can see a gallery of the participants images here, and read more info here. This trip is open for reservations contact Lesley@oceanfrontiers.com to reserve your place.
May 2009 - Shark Greetings Cards
For when a shark says it best. I am pleased to see that the new collection of Wildlife Photographer Of The Year greetings cards are now available in the UK shops. The series includes one card with my black and white photograph entitled Lone Shark, which was highly commended in the 2007 edition of the competition. The photograph was taken at Walkers Cay in the Bahamas on the 2005 Wetpixel shark trip on Jim Abernethys Shear Water. The cards are produced by The Art Group for the Natural History Museum and are available at selected high street shops across the UK. I am waiting for the fist person to send me one!
May 2009 - Scubapro UWATEC Diving Days
I am pleased to announce my involvement in the SCUBAPRO UWATEC Days 2009. The first is at Wittering Divers, West Sussex on the 6/7 June 2009 and the second is 11/12 July at Largs, Ayrshire, Scotland. My role will be to run some photo clinics and help people out with their underwater photography. The days are designed for you to come along and try new gear on an actual dive, learn about new products, and have fun with us. The boat dives are free, but they are short to allow as many people as possible to try different gear through the day. A Scubapro Uwatec Day is much more than just an opportunity to test new gear in an actual dive and to discover new details about our products during the technical briefings that are held before the dive. This is a moment where the company staff and the divers can meet, exchange information and, most of all, share their passion for diving not just by diving but also having fun together on land: a real occasion to celebrate scuba diving. For those not in the UK, there are Scubapro days running across Europe, I am hoping to make a few next year.
May 2009 - Cooliris 3D Wall Portfolio
I know that the slideshow galleries on my website can be a little frustrating, I use that software because it does not allow people to right click and easily download my images. The key is to run them as slide shows, rather than trying to browse the tiny thumbnails. Anyway I am experimenting with creating galleries that are viewable with the Cooliris 3D Wall free plug-in for web browsers. This software opens the gallery is full screen, infinite, controllable wall of images. At present the files are slightly small and pixelate slightly when enlarged to the full screen and I have only installed this gallery for my portfolio. If you use Cooliris, please take a look at the gallery and tell me whether you like it in this format. With positive feedback I will add more galleries in this format in the future and when I update my portfolio in a few months (I have some many new images I am excited by) I will use appropriately sized images.
April 2009 - Membership of the Ocean Artists Society
I am proud to announce that I am one of the 2009 inductees to the Ocean Artists Society, a group of distinguished painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, and writers coming together to use ocean art to inspire people around the world to a greater awareness of our need to protect and preserve our natural world. The Society provides a platform for participating members to reach ever larger audiences through group participation at dive show events, art shows, as well as various print publications. As artists of the sea it is our responsibility to protect what we love by sharing the beauty of the oceans with others. The Society now has 114 members, although as far as I am aware I am the only member from the UK. The Ocean Artists Society was founded by Wyland, Guy Harvey and Bob Talbot.
April 2009 - Fourth Element Brochure
I am pleased to see my black and white photo of a reef shark over ripples featured on the cover the 2009 product catalogue of Fourth Element, the UK based company famed for their technical approach to dive clothing. Many of their products combine thoughtful and stylish design with the latest fabric technologies creating a range that highlights performance, function and innovation in its designs. I am a great fan of all their range and already own most of it. We have been talking about a collaboration for a few years and I am pleased we will be working together in the future (I think that they were just waiting for me to have bought most of their inventory myself). I first got to know Fourth Element through their support of the Our World Underwater Scholarship Society, when I hosted the 2003 Scholar Jade Berman at the National Oceanography Centre. Jade had all this space age dive gear and I was most envious. Fourth Element also supports the Shark Trust and were named Shark Champions by the Charity in 2008. Another reason I am happy to be working with them.
March 2009 - Talks at LIDS
On the weekend of 27th/28th March I will be attending the London International Dive Show 2009 (LIDS) and will be giving two presentations on each day. The first, at 12:30 each day in the Red Sea Zone is on the photographic opportunities in the Red Sea. Other speakers in the Red Sea Zone are John Kean, John Bantin and Ned Middleton. Then at 14:45 each day I am teaming up again with Saeed Rashid and Paul Duxfield to present the Digital Photo Clinic. These photo clinic is always driven by questions from the audience, although we have some new tips and techniques to share, even if you have been before. If you are at the show, come along and say hi. I will probably be hanging out at the BSoUP stand between my presentations (stand 660).
March 2009 - OWU Competition Results
I am very proud to have been a judge of the Wetpixel & DivePhotoGuide international underwater photography & video competition in association with Our World Underwater. each year, since its inception 4 years ago. This year I was joined on the judging panel by David Doubilet, Dietmar Fuchs and Cor Bosman, who had the challenging but enjoyable task of selecting the winners. The competition goes from strength to strength and with near $50,000 in prizes, as well as being open to both amateur and professional photographers is one of the highest standard events in the world. The prize winners in the competition came from over 20 countries. The Best of Show in the stills competition went to Justin Gilligan of Australia, who photo of a Portuguese Man-O-War is shown on the left. You can see the full gallery of winners here, and particularly if you are planning on entering next year, you can read the judges comments here.
March 2009 - Nordic Photo Event 2009
I am excited to announce that I am going to lead the teaching on the Nordic Photo Event 2009, organised by Sea Safaris. My co hosts are Christian Skauge, Ingvar Eliasson and Lars Stenholt Kirkegaard. It will be my first time in Norway, but the rest of the guys are all regular addicts to this destination, which is known as one of the best cold water diving destinations in the world. Note that this means drysuit diving. The workshop will offer a mix of wreck and marine life photography, is limited to 20 and runs from the 2nd June to 7th June, price DKK 7999 (approx 1075 Euros). This is a unique possibility to both try some of Scandinavias top diving, at the best time of year, and to join a workshop with a level of quality that is rarely seen. The event will take place at Gulen Dive Resort north of Bergen on the west coast of Norway. The dive resort is exclusively ours for the duration of the workshop and we have set up a full package for you that includes everything from qualified dive staff, accomodation, food, equipment handling, workshop facilities etc. Click here for more info or download the PDF.
March 2009 - New Images: Raja Ampat
In February and March 2009 I travelled to Raja Ampat in West Papua, Indonesia to lead my Divequest Ultimate Indonesia group trip with Graham Abbott of Diving 4 Images on the Seven Seas Liveaboard. This was a truly exceptional trip and I dived in so many different environments and photographed so many different subjects it seems futile to list them all. The reefs, mangroves and underwater scenery was stunning and the marine life varied from tiny pygmy seahorses to giant black Pacific manta rays. I photographed in Salawati, Kofiau, Nampale (West Misool), many sites in SE Misool, Batanta, Gam, Waigeo and near Kri. The photos from this extensive trip are divided into the Raja Ampat general gallery, which you can see here, and a special gallery dedicated to photography in the mangroves, which you can see here. With so many special images these galleries are currently password protected. Please email me for access.
March 2009 - Diving Almanac 2009
I am excited to announce that I have contributed the chapter on Photography and Video to the 2009 Diving Almanac. The Diving Almanac & Book of Records is the only almanac, yearbook, book of records, and who's who of the international diving community. Undercurrent Magazine describing it as perhaps the best single reference book ever published for divers.. Updated and revised every year, it provides the most up-to-date information on diving demographics, 500 diving records and aquatic superlatives, 600 personalities, history, training, medicine, federations and associations per country, equipment, marine biology, oceanography, world news, magazines, new books and DVDs, dive destinations for over 150 countries and territories, and much more. Over 750 pages of facts, figures, charts and illustrations, including 56 pages in full color, provide readers with a unique international view of diving activities, the diving community, and underwater sciences. No other single volume offers such a wealth of information on as many diving-related subjects. It is exciting to be involved with this project.
February 2009 - New Images: Lembeh Strait
As part of my Ultimate Indonesia trip for Divequest I spend more than a week photographing the weird and wonderful creatures of the Lembeh Strait. Each visit to this unique destination is totally different to the last because different critters are always dominant. The undoubted highlight of this stay was photographing the rarely seen mimic octopus mating. Those who have read Reefs Revealed will know that I am far from convinced by the mimicing stories, but was thrilled to see some true natural behaviour from these charismatic cephalopods, which was only given a name, Thaumoctopus mimicus, by scientists in 2005. The photo above shows the smaller male on top of the female. With the benefit of Lembeh Resort's excellent guides spotting critters for me, I saw and photographed so much more including other exotic cephalpods including the flambouyant cuttlefish, wunderpus octopus, pygmy squid and a wide variety of other invertebrate and vertebrate critters. You can see a gallery of my images from my Lembeh Strait visit here.
February 2009 - New Images: Buyat Bay
New images and a new destination. I was fortunate to be invited by the guys at Lembeh Resort to join them as photographer on an exploratory trip to Buyat Bay, a new diving destination in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Buyat Bay is completely different from Lembeh being typified by clear water and exceptional coral growth. The reefs form steep slopes rather than drop offs so are almost continuous carpets of coral. Table corals and branching corals dominate in the shallows, giving way to lettuce corals and more massive forms with depth. Some colonies are huge, see the photo. Lembeh Resort intend to start taking people to this exciting new destination, which can be easily combined with a trip to Lembeh Strait, very soon. You can see a gallery of my images from Buyat Bay here and can read an introductory article about the destination that I wrote while on location on DivePhotoGuide. Look out for more articles on Buyat Bay.
February 2009 - Cover: DIVE Magazine
I am pleased to say that one of my photographs has been selected for the cover of the March 2009 Issue of the UK's DIVE Magazine. The photo was taken in the Maldives and is also featured in my book The Art Of Diving. It was part of a series on the enjoyment of diving. The issue also contains the second installment of my new column on the techniques of underwater photography: PhotoPro, which this month covers the tips and tricks involved in photographing anemonefish featuring an image of a Red Sea Anemonefish that I took with the Nikon D700 in November. Apologies if the image does not appear it is hot linked from the DIVE Magazine website.
February 2009 - Get a flavour of my photo workshops
Professional (land) photographer Predrag Vuckovic (those in Europe will have seen some of his photographs in the current issue of Nikon Pro) has recently published a short story about what it was like to attend my most recent underwater photography workshop in Grand Cayman. You can read it on his website. And this has prompted me to collect together some of the other various reports, diaries and galleries to give any of you thinking of attending in the future a better idea of what they are like. I usually run two each year, one in January in Grand Cayman and one in the Red Sea in June or sometimes in November. You can see a gallery of participants' underwater photographs from the Cayman workshop here and also see a gallery of Predrag's topside images from the workshop here. You can also see a you can read my diary from my November Red Sea Workshop here and see a gallery of topside photos here. Also look out for a report on the Cayman Workshop by Julian Cohen in issue 47 of Underwater Photography Magazine.
January 2009 - Equipment tests in Grand Cayman
My photo workshop in Grand Cayman allowed me to conduct a number of tests of new kit and self-made equipment I have been working on. A major aim was testing the performance of wide angle rectilinear lenses on FX Nikons, particularly the 17-35mm. I tested it with three different domes, three different extension rings and two dioptres (and no dioptre) at a range of apertures. I also tested my new ring-flash system, see photo left and the flounder, below was taken with it, and wide angle, underwater soft-boxes for my Inons, and strobe snoots complete wuith egg crate inserts. I'll be publishing my findings in a variety of places such as my PhotoPro column in DIVE Magazine, as articles and in the forums in Wetpixel and, of course, in Underwater Photography Magazine (you will have to check out them all as I will write exclusive reports, rather that repeating them in the different media). If I get time I will reproduce some of the reports on my website too.
January 2009 - Back from Cayman Photo Workshops
In the second half of January I escaped the English winter and heading to Grand Cayman to run two digital underwater photography workshops on the subject of Understanding, capturing and controlling underwater light at Ocean Frontiers on the East End. I was joined by an impressively talented group of photographers on each week and I learned lots. I hope that they did too. The workshop lectures covered available light, strobe light and balanced light, looking in detail at each. Topics included lens filters, strobe filters, diffusers and underwater soft boxes, snoots, ring flash, flat versus directional light, sunbursts, blues, complimentary colours, and most importantly how the different characteristics of strobe and ambient light determine the types of subject matter that can be captured effectively in underwater photographs. You can see a gallery of my images (email me for Cayman password) here and a gallery of the participants images here (I have not got everyones images in there yet).
January 2009 - New PhotoPro Column in DIVE Magazine
Starting this month, my new column on the techniques of underwater photography is published in DIVE Magazine, world-wide subscriptions are available. I am really excited to be doing this project and having already written the first four installments, I am looking forward to what people make of them. To give you a flavour, this is the opening paragraph, of what I hope will be a long running series. Welcome. This column is here to help you take better underwater photographs. I hope to build on DuxyÕs excellent and enjoyable Snapper School, talking technique for both compacts and SLRs. While this column unashamedly focuses on the methods of underwater photography, I do not intend to make this a tech-fest mired in jargon and camera settings. I would rather share the key aspects of the photographic process that differentiate producing a stunning shot from an average one. I hope my monthly musings will prove pertinent whatever camera system you use.
December 2008 - Merry Christmas and a Happy 2009
Just a quick message to say that I am away in Sardinia over Christmas and back in the UK for New Year's eve. 2008 has been an amazing year and has completely refreshed, refilled and transformed my portfolio since the award winning Reefs Revealed was published. Next year looks very exciting too, but more about that soon. Merry Christmas everyone!
December 2008 - Back from the Cayman Islands
In early December I escaped the cold UK, not that I spend much time here anyway, and headed to the Cayman Islands for a short pre-Christmas shoot. It was a chance to re-famialarise myself with the divesites and conditions ahead of my workshops next month and to take some images I needed to demonstrate certain points during those talks. It was also a chance to take a few snaps and give my D2X a swansong. I plan to retire it from front line action in the 2009. I shot wide angle reefs scenes down at the East End and then shore dived, mainly at Sunset House, shooting reef fish, and I am very pleased with the resulting images. The conditions in Cayman are so suitable to underwater photography that I always bag more classic shots that I am expecting. I am back in the Cayman Islands for two weeks at the end of January to run a pair of digital photo workshops, focussed on controlling light underwater, at Ocean Frontiers on the East End. I'll post a gallery of images from all these weeks after that trip here.
December 2008 - Back from the Red Sea, again
I am just back from another week of photography in the Red Sea, this time on MY Whirlwind, the same boat I was on in June and will be running my 2009 Red Sea workshop on (see below). This trip was one that my girlfriend Eleonora won in last years BSAC Travel Club competition. She was kind enough to invite me along although I did have to do some underwater modelling for her. The photo, which she took, shows me modelling photographing some dolphins on the Giannis D wreck. We did the classic Sharm itinerary of wrecks and reefs and it was excellent. I had not dived on the Thistlegorm for a few years, and yes it is not as good as it once was, but it is still stunning. We had great marine life encounters too. I was pleased with my photos and Ele got some great ones too. Our trip was made particularly good fun as we were joined on board by a great group of divers from Yorkshire. Thanks also to all the crew and our guides Thomas and Susie. You can see a gallery of my photos from the trip here.
November 2008 - Nikon D700 Review
My detailed review of the Nikon D700 FX digital camera and the Subal ND700 housing in the Red Sea has been published on Wetpixel. Nikons D700 is a classic pocket-battleship DSLR. It bristles with the heavy weight features of the top of line D3, sharing the same 12 MP FX sensor, image processing engine with 14-bit AD converter and Multi-Cam 3500FX auto-focus system, but in a smaller, cheaper and lighter body. Those last three points are sure to make it more attractive than its big brother to the underwater photographer. The Subal ND700 is the first housing to the market and shows their typical craftmanship and attention to ergonomic detail, read more.
November 2008 - Red Sea Workshop June 2009
I am pleased to announce that my 2009 Red Sea workshop will be on MV Whirlwind at the end of June 2009, once again focusing on the wrecks, reefs and seasonal schools of fish in the northern Red Sea (photo from previous workshop). The cost is £1050 for the entire trip, London to London (dates 27th June to 4th July 2009). The workshop usually attracts people from many countries, but I prefer people to fly through London, because I do not want to delay the departure of the liveaboard if other flights to Sharm El Sheikh do not arrive on time (the cost includes the flights from London). The workshop is aimed at DSLR photographers and is designed to help you progress from taking images that come out to photos that stand out. All my previous Red Sea workshops have sold out quickly, so please contact me soon if you are interesting in joining. Trip now FULLY BOOKED.
November 2008 - DVD: Shooting Magic
I am very excited to announce my first film Shooting Magic, which is an instructional DVD on the techniques of available underwater photography with filters. The DVD follows me over 6 dives in the Red Sea, three shooting with my DSLR and three with my compact camera, while I demonstrate and describe the techniques I am using and the considerations, both technical and artistic that go into producing stunning available light photographs. After each of the six dives, I give you a one to one review of the shots and discuss in detail why some have worked and others have not. You will see all the shots, both good and bad, unadjusted straight from the camera. The DVD is packed with 90 minutes of features. Shooting Magic was filmed by Peter Rowlands and will be released when I get back from the Red Sea, see below.
November 2008 - Back from the Red Sea
At the start of November I headed to the Red Sea to run my 2008 Red Sea Photo Workshop on the dive boat Blue Horizon recently voted world's best liveaboard by the readers of Diver Magazine. This event was a very international affair with photographers joining from the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Holland, USA and India. It was a highly productive and enjoyable week exploring the southern Egyptian Red Sea from Elphinstone down to St Johns reef. The group produced some truly stunning images. We were also lucky to get some decent encounters with oceanic whitetip sharks at Eliphinstone. In addition to running the workshop I also took the Subal ND700 housing and Nikon D700 camera with me and you can read a review on Wetpixel here. I generally run two each year, one in the Cayman Islands and one in the Red Sea, click here for more info. You can read a diary of workshop here, see onboard pictures here and see my underwater pictures here.
November 2008 - Book Cover: DIVE
I am pleased to say that my photograph has been chosen for the cover of the second edition of DIVE The Ultimate Guide by Monty Halls and published by Ultimate Sports, who published my book The Art Of Diving. Completely updated for 2008, this carefully researched and fully illustrated guide is packed with all the practical travel information needed to plan any great underwater adventure. According to the publishers it is the world's best selling world scuba diving guide by far. DIVE has been published in English, German, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Polish and Romanian language editions. I do not have any photographs inside the book.
November 2008 - Bite Back Calendar
Bite-Back, the UK based shark and marine conservation organisation has just launched its 2009 calendar and I am happy to say that I was one of the 12 photographer's who donated an image and commentary for it. Bite-Back campaigns against over-fishing and has a fantastic track record in persuading retailers to stop selling threatened fish species. Congratulations to Graham, Suzanne and all the bite-back team on all their work on their campaigns. The twelve photographers who have donated images are (in month order) Brian Skerry, Doug Perrine, Chris Fallows, me, Thomas Peschak, David Fleetham, David Doubilet, James Honeyborne, Michael Aw, Tim Laman, Norbert Wu and Jeff Rotman. With such a great cause, a cast of photographers and Christmas coming soon, you know what you have to do!
October 2008 - Show Season
I will be away a lot during the last couple of weeks of October, but strangely I will be staying dry. Its show season in the underwater photography world and I have a busy schedule. First up I will be at DEMA in Las Vegas. I am giving two talks in the Imaging Resource Center. Also Peter and I are exhibiting as Magic Filters, you can find us at booth 3049. We have an exciting new product to launch. Then it is off to the Antibes Festival in France. Once again Magic Filters are exhibiting, we will be at booth 16. However, I have to leave before the end of the festival (Peter is there until the end) for the UK Diveshow at the NEC, where I am once again running the Digital Clinic with Photoshop Expert Saeed Rashid and Paul Duxfield, who writes the Snapper School column for Dive Magazine. Finally, I am not selling my own books at any of the shows, but I expect them to be on sale (not sure about DEMA) and I am very happy to sign any I see!
October 2008 - Cover: DIVE Magazine
I am pleased to say that my popular photo of an Australian Sealion, taken at Kangaroo Island, is on the cover of this month's dive magazine. This photo was taken with my Nikon D2X and Tokina 10-17mm fisheye zoom and lit with Inon strobes. It is the first time that Dive Magazine have used one of my cold water diving images on their cover. Hoepfully there will be more soon. I took this photo in December last year during my trip to South Australia, you can see a gallery of other images from that trip here.
October 2008 - Presenting at DEMA
I am excited to announce that I am presenting two underwater photography seminars at the Image Resource Center during the DEMA show in Las Vegas. The DEMA Show is the only international trade-only event for the diving industry, attracting more than 11500 professionals, so I am really looking forward to being a part of it. Peter Rowlands and I are also exhibiting Magic Filters for the first time too. Yes, we are finally going ligit! I am also really looking forward to finally meeting in person, many folks who I know only through email. And last, but not least, my final reason to be excited is that this will be first trip to Vegas, baby. I am not at DEMA to officially promote my books, but if you have copies and would like them signed please come and find me.
October 2008 - New Portfolio
Phew... and rest. For a few weeks. Once I completed the photography for Reefs Revealed, which was published a year ago in October 2007, I set myself the challenge of not just rebuilding my portfolio by expanding it considerably. Up to that time I had dived mainly on coral reefs, but having produced a coral reef book that won the top award at the Antibes festival I realised that it was time for new challenges. As there was no way I could top that. So since then I am visited an incredibly diverse range of underwater habitats and photographed scenery and creatures I had only dreamed of. I am still diving on coral reefs, but i am also exploring more and more underwater habitats. Checking my passport and my dive log I have done over 450 dives from freshwater in the UK, to the Southern Ocean along the south coast of Australia since completing RR! If I look back at my portfolio then and compare it with now, it is totally transformed. And to some extent this is just the beginning. The Oceans are just so much bigger to me now. And I am very pleased that my style of underwater photography has transfered smoothly to these different environments. I finally have a few months off from major trips and I hope to take stock and enjoy some of the new images I have taken. I have recently updated my portfolio and included some of these new images, in fact half of the images in the portfolio were taken since Reefs Revealed was published. You can see the portfolio here.
September 2008 - Nikon D3 Review on Wetpixel
I am pleased to say that my review of the Nikon D3 and Subal ND3 housing is now up online at Wetpixel. Its a big one. Over 8000 words, 12 pages and 34 images. The review was done on my recent trip to North America, where I dived in Canada, the USA and in Mexico with the camera. Here is the conclusion: The D3 takes excellent macro and wide angle underwater photos. I love the D3 screen (also on the D700, D300 and D90). I miss the Tokina! I miss the D3, now it is returned. FX is great and easy to adapt to. However, the advantages of FX really depend on what you photograph. If you shoot mainly in the tropics or shoot mainly macro then FX offers little over DX. However, if you shoot plenty of wide angle in low light, then the D3 wont just allow you to take types of images you never could before, it will change your approach to photography in these conditions. This makes it a very exciting underwater camera. Read the full review on Wetpixel. I hope to get this review up in a few other places, including here, soon.
September 2008 - BBC Science Website
Check out my shark, which is now part of the banner on the newly redesigned BBC Science and Nature Website. The BBC website is the UK's most visited site and given my interests I think that the Science and Nature page is a pretty cool place to see one of my images being used. This photo was taken on one of the Wetpixel Bahamas shark trips. Don't forget that this image of the shark is also available as part of the Signature range of my limited edition fine art prints.
September 2008 - The Underwater Channel
I am excited to tell you that my show Creature Feature is now being broadcast on The Underwater Channel, the free to view online TV channel. You can either watch my show as a stand alone or as part of the magazine program Splash. Join Dr. Alex Mustard as he sneaks into the archives at the Underwater Channel and has a browse through some of the breathtaking footage captured by some of the worlds leading underwater cameramen, such as Peter Scoones and the Scubazoo team. This is a rare chance to marvel at their never-before-seen raw footage accompanied by Mustards insightful interpretations. The program is next best thing to actually being there in the ocean. Mustard added It is an amazing opportunity to have access to this material. It is like going behind the scenes of wildlife film and experiencing the underwater world as if perched on the shoulder of one of these top cameramen. For me, each program is a voyage of discovery, I never know what is going to happen next and these guys regularly capture creatures and behaviours new to science.
September 2008 - Back from Guadalupe
I have also just returned from Guadalupe, the island of the great white shark. Guadalupe is without a doubt a best place to photograph white sharks anywhere in the world. Twenty hours steam out into the Pacific from northern Mexico, this barren rocky island is an ideal home for seals and sealions. Well ideal except for one reason. Great white sharks visit its clear waters in considerable numbers to feed on the mammals. Travelling with my friend Jeff Hartog, I joined an awesome trip with Shark Diving International on the excellentSolmar V to photograph the oceans most famous fish. In addition to photographing the sharks I was also able to shoot, above the water, blue whales (the biggest fish in the sea, as my friend Simon would say) and large numbers of elephant seals, sealions and fur-seals. You can find a gallery of images from this trip here.
August 2008 - Back from Canada
I have recently returned from a breathtaking trip to the chilly waters of British Columbia in Canada. I joined underwater photographers Todd Mintz, Rand McMeins and John Davies. We were on the liveaboard Mamro and diving the famous Browning Passage out of Port Hardy in north Vancouver Island. There are few places in the world that support such colourful underwater life and abundant critters. It is not known as the worlds best cold water diving for nothing. It was an eye opening experience. The scenery above the water was also stunning and I also photographed eagles, stellar sealion, deer and bear. This trip was also my first chance to shoot Nikons D3 FX camera in a Subal housing. You can read my review on the camera on Wetpixel. You can find a gallery of images from this trip here.
August 2008 - Cayman Workshop - new places
In January 2009 I am running a photo workshop in Grand Cayman. This workshop is limited to 12 people, but the original week was overbooked. So rather than squeeze everybody in, I have agreed to run a second week. The first week (17 to 24 Jan) is now full. UPDATE (6th Sept): two places remain on week 2 (24 to 31 Jan). The workshop will focus on lighting and we will be concentrating on shooting reef wide angle (walls, caverns), fish photography, and bigger creatures (rays, tarpon, sharks). For the stingrays we will be doing special dawn and sunset shoots to get great light and schooling behaviour (at dawn). The only way to reserve a place on this trip is to contact Ocean Frontiers. Email: Lesley@oceanfrontiers.com, Phone toll free (USA only) 1.800.348.6096.
August 2008 - Red Sea Pocket Guide
I am pleased to announce that I was a major photographic contributor to Tauchen magazines new 100 page booklet, Pocket Guide Fur Taucher Rotes Meer. The booklet contains some of my better know images as well as a large number of previously unpublished shots from the region. I also shot the cover image, which shows Peter Rowlands on Jackson Reef in the Strait of Tiran. Incidentally that image was taken on my first trip with my D2X, which recently passed 100,000 photos and is still going strong. I was very pleased to be part of this very useful publication (assuming you can speak German!).
August 2008 - Back from Sardinia
I have just returned from a week of underwater photography in the Mediterranean around the island of Sardinia in Italy, although we also travelled up to the island of Lavezzi, which is officially part of France as it is closer to the Corsican coast. Scuba diving originated in the Mediterranean and there is always something special about diving in these waters. I also passed my own land mark of 2000 dives during this trip. During this trip we did all our diving from private boats, allowing us lots of time in the water at each site and always insuring that we never saw anybody else in the water. You can see a gallery from my Sardinian trip here.
August 2008 - Cover: Tauchen Magazine
It is always nice to get magazine covers. This month Tauchen, Europe's largest diving magazine, have used one of my lionfish images for their issue on the world's best reefs. This image was actually shot as a horizontal, but they have cropped it to a vertical for the cover. Despite the crop the image still looks pin sharp and full of detail. You really have to see a copy of the magazine to appreciate this. Anyway it makes me wonder why I am saving up for a new camera, when my existing one is capable of such amazing image quality.
July 2008 - Back from the Bahamas
I have just returned from a simply stunning trip to the Bahamas, leading the Wetpixel Expedition: Sharks and Dolphins on the MV Shear Water run by Jim Abernethy's Scuba Adventures. The photo shows the group on the back of the liveaboard, surrounded by sharks! OK, so the title turned out to be something of a misnomer as the trip also included Palm Beach muck diving (which was so productive, mating seahorses and mating long arm octopus, that I have created a separate gallery for the Florida section of the trip), Gulf Stream night pelagic drift, super macro plankton photography, nocturnal critter hunt on Sugar Wreck, fishing for birds as well as more sharks and dolphins than you could shake a stick at. It was really amazing, on one day I shot over 1400 images. You can read a diary report of the trip on the Wetpixel forums here, scroll down to read the various installments. You can see a gallery from the Bahamas trip here.
July 2008 - TWO NEW SPACES on Ultimate Indonesia
FULL AGAIN. In February/March 2009 I am running my dream dive trip to Indonesia. Diving in the Lembeh Strait for critters and in Raja Ampat for wide angle. The trip is being coordinated by Divequest and top dive guide Graham Abbott is co-leading the Raja Ampat section. The trip has been fully booked for a few months. Indonesia straddles the coral triangle, an imaginary shape drawn on the map by scientists that defines the bounds of the world's richest marine habitats. Our two destinations are accepted by most as the two very different ultimate expresssions of that richness. The Lembeh Strait is THE critter capitol, the benchmark destination that all muck diving spots are measured against. Still further east, the Raja Ampat archipelago, off the western end of New Guinea, has the most beautiful, thriving and biodiverse coral reefs in the world. It is a destination that has blown the minds of even the most widely travelled underwater photographers. If you think you have seen coral reefs in all their glory, think again.However a cancellation has opened two spaces. Contact Divequest or me, if you are interested in joining this phenomenal expedition. There are more details a href="http://www.amustard.com/?page=fishplans&subpage=plans&size=s">here.
July 2008 - Scuba Diving Photo Issue
I am proud to announce that I was one of six underwater photographers asked to contribute to the How the pros do it feature in Scuba Diving Magazine's Photo Issue 2008. I was particularly pleased as I was the only non-US based photographer who contributed to the feature in this American magazine. I wrote a short article on fish portraits, the other contributions in this interesting features were Stuart Westmorland on motion blur, Rod Klein on reef scenes, Amos Nachoum on big animals, David Doubilet on the half and half and Brandon Cole on sharks. Like most months, the issue also includes one of my underwater images used in an advert for the Cayman islands.
You can see a gallery of images here.
June 2008 - Back from the Red Sea
It is nice to be home after two back to back trips. I only had a 36 hour turnaround between my Lembeh and Red Sea trips which was a bit stressful to be honest! The Red Sea trip was great, I think that this was my twelfth year in a row going at this time to the Red Sea with my friends from BSoUP specially to target the mating schools or large fish that gather at Ras Mohammed. The photo, right, shows me with rabbit ears courtesy of BSoUP president JP Trenque. The trips are great fun with much mickey taking, myself seemingly the butt of most jokes, particularly when Peter Rowlands is around. The main aim of my trip was to produce an instructional video on how to take underwater photos with filters. Peter was filming and I was in the staring role as the photographer (hardly worthy of crediting was Denis Antippa in the role of model). We filmed 6 dives of me shooting with filters, three each with compact and DSLR, discussed the photographic techniques I was using and then reviewed all the images from the dives (both good and bad), straight from the camera. It was good fun and I think that the resulting footage is packed of useful information. In fact I even learned things from seeing myself taking pictures underwater water. I am not sure when the finished video will be available (probably in the autumn), but I'll be sure to announce it here. You can see a gallery of images here.
June 2008 - Back from Lembeh
I have just returned from a hugely productive trip to the Lembeh Strait. It is such a mecca for underwater photographers because there are so many great subjects there, and my recent trip did not disappoint. I stayed at the excellent Lembeh Resort and the trip also acted as a recce for my Ultimate Indonesia group trip for Divequest, next year. That trip is already full, BTW. Regarding the critters I saw all the Lembeh regulars: mimic octopus, wonderpus, bluering octopus, flamboyant cuttlefish, painted frogfish, giant frogfish, hairy frogfish, warty frogfish, a multitude of scorpionfish and waspfish, many many nudibranchs, crabs, shrimps and mantis shrimps, pygmy seahorse, pygmy pipefish, ghost pipefish and benthic sharks. Rather than using only traditional macro lenses I shot a reasonable amount of wide angle, which I think helps place the critters in their barren, sandy environment and helps to explain their extreme morphological adaptations. You can see a gallery of images here.
May 2008 - Interview for Monde Bleu
Bruno Beauverger, author of the Monde Bleu blog, has recently published an interview with me in English (actually I was expecting him to translate it into French to make me look cleverer). Anyway, it is up online and available for any English speakers to read. The interview has a bit of background on me, and then some interesting discussion about the technique, aesthetics and inspiration for my underwater photography. There are details of the kit I use and why, as well as chat about some of my favourite locations and best dives. I think it makes an interesting read and contains some useful advice and information on underwater photography. Check it out here.
April 2008 - IM RIFF
I am pleased to announce that IM RIFF, the German language edition of my book Reefs Revealed, has been launched. The book is published by Terra magica-Bildbande and was translated by Ursula Bischoff. The cover is the same image as the English version. I have to say I prefer the French cover! This book has already won the Prix Mondial Du Livre D'Image Sous-Marine at the 34th Festival Mondial De L'Image Sous Marine in Antibes. There are details of how to order your copy within the books section of this website.
May 2008 - Back from Gran Canaria
I am just back from a short, but highly enjoyable trip to Gran Canaria. I went there for just 4 and a half days of diving to test some new strobe filters and to shoot angel sharks (which have recently been added to the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species), seahorses and cuttlefish. I also had the chance to test a variety of new kit such as the INON optical converter, Sea & Sea YS250 strobes and Nikon's new 60mm AFS macro lens. It was great fun seeing friends David Barrio Luisa Quintanilla again. It is their fault I love Gran Canaria. And it was a real pleasure to immerse myself in the vibrant underwater photography scene out there. You can see a gallery of images here.
April 2008 - Your Story on Brendiver Blog
I have recently written a brief article for Brendiver's World, the blog of underwater photo journalist Brendan O Brien, about getting started in underwater photo-journalism. Brendan has also coerced similar pieces from John Bantin and Elaine Whiteford, and I am sure there will be more to follow. Brendan has just started his blog, but he is actively filling it up with real world advice on getting published. It looks like it will become an excellent resource. You can read my story here.
May 2008 - Cover: UWP Magazine
Please to report that one of my photographs is on the cover of the May/June issue of Underwater Photography magazine (the free, online magazine all about Underwater Photography). It is exactly a year since I last had a cover on this magazine. The photo is of a pair of Australian Sealions taken at Kangaroo Island in South Australia with my Nikon D2X + Tokina 10-17mm and Inon strobes. More importantly the issue also contains an article I have written on the role of the colour temperature of your strobes in underwater photography. Specifically their affect on the water colour of your images. Check out the issue to read more...
April 2008 - The Sea Magazine
A new, British based magazine called The Sea was launched this month and I am pleased to say that I have an article in the inaugural issue. The magazine has a broad remit: covering all things marine from news, history, diving, oceanography and wildlife to leisure, culture and commerce. My article is a wildlife article about hamlet fish, their reproductive behaviour, evolution and speciation. It is a great to to subscribe to this magazine and there is even a special discounted subscription rate for RNLI members (three issues for £1).
April 2008 - UK Photography
In stark contrast to the conditions on my recent trip to Thailand, the last few days have been time to don the drysuit for some early season fun here in the UK. It was good get in the water (already 10ûC) and start brushing up those drysuit skills, but more importantly I was hoping to catch some photos of cuttlefish mating. Which I did in nice conditions in Babbacombe in east Devon. I also spent a couple of days photographing in the much clearer waters around Plymouth with Peter Rowlands and was pleased to add substantially to my UK portfolio. The images from this shoot are currently under wraps, but I will share them on this website soon. For now on the right, you can see a photo of a spider crab that I took on Monday...
April 2008 - Advertising Award
I am pleased to say that an advertisement featuring one of my Red Sea photographs recently won gold in the Scandinavian Advertising Awards 2008 in the alternative media category and received a nomination in the PR-category. The advert was produced by the Swedish agency KING and was placed underwater! You can even see an movie showing the advert in place in the Baltic Sea near Stockholm on You Tube.
April 2008 - Back from Thailand
I am just back from an excellent three week trip to photograph the reefs of Thailand. The trip was organised by legendary underwater filmmaker Peter Scoones, the man behind the camera for many of the most memorable sequences in the BBC's Blue Planet and Planet Earth. For most of the trip the liveaboard was just moored up on the reef and we were encouraged to go in and out when we wanted. This was excellent for both photographing marine life (portraits and behaviour) and for experimenting and refining new creative techniques. During the trip I worked on three new creative techniques: backlighting and off camera strobes, in camera double exposures and top lighting. The example on the right is an in camera double exposure combining a macro foreground with a wide angle background with infinite depth of field. You can see a gallery of images from this trip here and look out for more details of these techniques in articles.
March 2008 - Critter Compulsive
I don't normally write about my regular editorial output on this news page, but I wanted to mention my article Critter Compulsive in the April issue of DIVE Magazine because it the first time I have tried writing an article in a journalist style. Rather than describing my own experiences, instead I interviewed three experts in the field and pulled the article together around their opinions. The article is about looking for the little stuff and what we can learn from these macro devotees. The interviewees for the article were photographer and author Andrea Ferrari, dive guide extraordinaire, cruise director Graham Abbott and scientist and author Dave Harasti. Thanks guys for your help.
March 2008 - LIDS Exhibition
I was very excited to see an exhibition of my photography at the London International Dive Show (LIDS). The display showed 36 of my photographs from Australia, Indonesia, Mexico, Grand Cayman, the USA, Egypt, the Maldives, the Canary Islands, the Bahamas and Malaysia. Many of the photos are currently not in the public galleries on my website, with most taken since the publication of Reefs Revealed. The prints were done by the show organisers so it was a nice surprise for me to see them when I arrived at the event. Hopefully they will be on display again at the NEC for the October Dive Show.
March 2008 - BUIF Awards
On Saturday 15th March I will be the MC for the British Underwater Image Festival 2008 (BUIF) award ceremony at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham. The award ceremony will be followed by a champagne reception. The finalists of the 2008 Festival will be displayed at the three-day Go Diving show, show, which is part of the Ordnance Survey Outdoors Show. Having already seen the finalist images this display is not to be missed! The panel of judges for the stills competition were Colin Doeg, Simon Rogerson, Charles Hood and me. The panel of the judges for the films were Peter Scoones, Colin Doeg and Simon Rogerson.
March 2008 - Cover: OE Magazine
I am pleased to announce that one of my zen diving images is on the cover of this month's Outdoor Enthusiast Magazine. The cover is accompanied by an article by Nick Hanna on zen and the art of diving, again with images from me. The article is a prŽcis of our book, but also includes a few insights from Nick since the first edition of The Art Of Diving was written. This image was taken in Grand Cayman in March 2004 with my old Nikon D100 and 10.5mm fisheye. It was always one of my favourites from the book and I am glad it has finally made it to a cover.
March 2008 - Photo Seminar at LIDS
At the London International Dive Show (LIDS) on 8/9th March I will co-hosting the Underwater Photography Clinic with Photoshop expert Saeed Rashid. The session will run on both days between 1:45 and 3:00 and much of the presentation will focus on helping you get better images. I will be advising on how to improve your in water photographic techniques and Saeed demonstrating how RAW conversion and Photoshop processing can improve those images you have already taken. If you are thinking of coming to LIDS and would like direct feedback on how you can improve your shots please email two or three of your images to info@focusindepth.com (the address can handle files up to 20mb, so RAW's or JPEG's are fine). Alternatively you can bring your pictures to the show and give them directly to me on the BSoUP stand, in the morning before the presentation each day. Ideally we are after problem images. Pictures that just aren't as good as you hoped that they would be. But we would also like a few stunners to be submitted, as a lot can also be learned from discussing why they are so effective. LIDS is also a good opportunity to get a signed copy of one of my books!
February 2008 - Talk at the Bath Festival
On Friday 29th February I am giving at talk at the Bath Literary Festival, in Bath, UK. I am presenting an illustrated talk on life on coral reefs and will also talk a little on the photographic approach to taking photographs ini the ocean. The Bath Literature Festival was started in 1995 and has become a well established ten days of literary events, encompassing writing in all its forms. For more information on my talk click here
February 2008 - Cover: DIVE Magazine
It seems ages since I had a photograph on a cover (of a magazine), so I am pleased to say that this month's DIVE magazine features one of my images. The photo was taken on Sipadan Island in Malaysia and shows a hawksbill turtle and diver. Although I have not used this photo in any of my books it has been a popular choice as a magazine cover, this being its third outing, although first in the UK. This image has also been used by the Malaysian tourist board.
February 2008 - Interview with Stuff Magazine
Check out the February 2008 edition of Stuff Magazine, the world's best-selling gadget magazine, to see a short interview with me about Scuba diving and underwater photography. It is not the most in depth interview but it is very nice to see underwater photography being covered by such a mainstream magazine. I even managed to work in a mention for the giant clam - my friend Simon's favourite underwater creature. This interview is not available online.
February 2008 - Interview with PhotographySites.com
Photography Sites, thematic photography directory designed to promote the exchange of traffic among similar types of online photo galleries, has recently published an illustrated interview with me about underwater photography. To quote from the introduction to the article The underwater world is... its a strange world but one which covers more of the planet's surface than land and has more creatures... its where life came from... good underwater photography, like all good photography, is more than a pictorial exercise but gives a glimpse of this mystical place and evokes a feeling of wonder and desire to venture further in. The interview covers my development as an underwater photographer, conservation photography, markets, techniques, kit, gear obsession and travel. To read the interview click here.
February 2008 - Dive with me
Each year I like to run a few group trips, either as dedicated photo workshops with lectures and teaching or more wildlife orientated trips with awesome diving and. At present I have three trips during the next 18 months that I have recently agreed to run and have spaces. First, in July I am leading the Wetpixel Bahamas Sharks and Dolphins (19-27 July, 2008), which will provide the chance for excellent photography with tiger, lemon and Caribbean Reef sharks as well as Atlantic spotted dolphins. Then in November I will be teaching a digital photography workshop in the southern Red Sea (7-14 Nov, 2008), targeting reefs, wrecks and oceanic whitetip sharks. At time of writing all these trips have spaces - although since I am away for a bit some might fill before I am back. And last, but by no means at all least, in February/March 2009 I am running what for me is the ultimate tropical trip - Ultimate Indonesia combining the best critter diving in Lembeh with the best reef diving in Raja Ampat. I hope that you can join me for one of these trips. The photo of me, right, was taken by Michael Gunter during a photo workshop in the Cayman Islands.
February 2008 - Mantas and Manatees
At the beginning of February I travelled first to Florida and then on to Mexico to photograph manatees and mantas, respectively. I was keen to photograph the manatees both in the clear blue waters of the springs and in the murkier green waters of the river in an attempt to get some original images of these well photographed animals. I got slightly more than I bargained for because at times the visibility was so low that I could not see my hand clearly if I reached out in front of me. At other times it was crystal blue. As well as photographing the manatee I was keen to record some of the other inhabitants of Florida's freshwater including blue gill fish, gar and freshwater turtles. You can see a gallery of manatees here. Then it was off to Cabo at the tip of the Baja Peninsula before heading out 250 miles into the Pacific to the Revillagigedos Archipelago. This was a Wetpixel group trip, which I led jointly with Eric Cheng. Here we encountered many sharks, dolphins and our main target giant black Pacific manta rays. You can see a gallery of my Mexican images here.
January 2008 - Cayman Film Festival and Workshop
In late January I travelled to the Cayman Islands to speak at the International Film Festival and to run a digital photography workshop at Ocean Frontiers diving the reefs of the legendary East End. This was actually be my first time speaking at the Cayman Island's film festival, an event which is held in conjunction with the International Scuba Diving Hall Of Fame. The other speakers included Leslie Leaney, Cathy Church and Bob Halstead and the standard of the presentations was very high. I thoroughly enjoyed it, this really is an event worth checking out. The main reason for my trip to Cayman is to run the workshop concentrating on reef and stingray photography. The group was limited to just 12, enough to ideally fill one of Ocean Frontiers excellent dive boats, with five photographers from the US, five from the UK and two from other parts of Europe. You will soon be able to see the guys photos from the week here, and you can see a few of mine here.
January 2008 - Contributing Editor, Wetpixel Quarterly
I am very proud to have been invited to be a Contributing Editor for the lavish new publication Wetpixel Quarterly. Wetpixel Quarterly is a print magazine devoted to high-quality underwater photography, each quarter, the pages are packed with brilliant underwater imagery from both professional and amateur photographers around the world. As well as celebrating the beauty of the deep, Wetpixel Quarterly provides a forum for a necessary dialog on marine conservation among photographers, researchers, conservationists, and the general public. Wetpixel Quarterly is an extension of Wetpixel.com, the premiere online community for underwater photographers and videographers. Check out the latest issue and you will see a portfolio of my fish portraits and an article I wrote on the threats of global warming to coral reefs and how this relates to underwater photographers.
January 2008 - Exhibition at National Maritime Museum
A selection of my underwater photographs will be on display at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth as part of their new year long exhibition Under The Sea. Diving deep into a world of shipwrecks, free diving, submarines, sport and commercial diving, physiology, underwater warfare and photography, this new exhibition promises you an experience under the water without getting wet. Alongside the images are objects chronologically charting the development of underwater photography. Discover the Calypsophot, developed for Jacques CousteauÕs underwater research group which featured in the Bond thriller Thunderball, and admire an early Rolleiflex camera from 1951. The exhibition also features the photography of fellow BSoUP members Mark Webster, Shannon Conway and JP Trenque. The year-lomng exhibition opens on 28 January 2008.
January 2008 - All Bribes Considered!
Its competition season in underwater photography and I am proud to be a judge on two of the most prestigious competitions around - so all offers of bribery will be considered. Only joking, of course. First up, I am one of the judging panel for 3rd Annual Wetpixel and DivePhotoGuide International Underwater Photography & Video Competition. I have been a judge for all the years of this competition and it really is an honour as the standard of the winning images is phenomenal. This year we have over $50,000 in prizes to give away. I am also one of the judging panel for the British Underwater Image Festival 2008 and once again I will be acting as MC and giving out the prizes at the Champagne Reception at the Go-Diving show at the NEC. People often ask me what i look for when judging, and the simple answer is wow me with an awesome shot that I have never seen before. A judge's job is simple, we want to choose the best possible images for the competition - and the best way to bribe us is to enter the best photos you can.
January 2008 - Sunday Times Magazine
The Sunday Times Magazine featured me in their long running "Best Of Times, Worst Of Times" feature describing the trials, tribulations and successes while photographing the undescribed species of walking shark in West Papua, Indonesia. The interview was done by Sue Fox. The article is also available online here. A longer version of the walking shark adventure was also recently published in Diver Magazine.
January 2008 - Ocean Team
I am very proud to have been invited to be a honorary member of Environmental Ocean Team. Ocean Team consists of members who have a passion for the sea. The aim is to bring together science with recreational sailing, by carrying out oceanographic research from sailing boats, which are inherently ecologically friendly, and to disseminate the findings to a wider public via various media platforms. The oceans are going to play such an important part in the future of this planet and there is so much more to learn about them. The scientists involved have a wealth of research expertise and Giovanni Soldini is an accomplished sailor - all the right ingredients to really make this project a success. Dame Ellen MacArthur
December 2007 - Back from Australia
I have just returned from a three week trip diving in the temperate waters of Australia. During the trip I explored the waters of New South Wales, from Sydney up to South West Rocks and also South Australia on both the Yorke and Fleurieu Peninsulas and on Kangaroo Island. My buddy for the trip was talented Australian based photographer Shannon Conway. I started the trip in Sydney, flying in on the new Airbus A380, which is very nice, before driving across to South Australia. In total we racked up over 5000kms of driving exploring a wide variety of dive sites. Key photographic subjects included leafy and weedy seadragons, grey nurse, wobbegong and Port Jackson sharks, several species of seahorses, pyjama squid, sealions and a wide variety of the regions endemic fish species. You can find links to the galleries for the two legs of the trip here.
December 2007 - Talking in Southampton
On the evening of Thursday 6th December I am giving a free talk at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton as part of their monthly Marine Life Series public lectures. This is at least the third time I have spoken in this series, although on this occasion I am also giving the talk at lunchtime so that more of the staff can attend. The talk is really just an excuse to project some of my favourite images going under the title of the Adventures of an underwater photographer Ð creating images that engage people with the oceans. I hope to explain a little bit about the species shown in the images and also the photographic techniques and process involved. The talk will include a number of photos from my recent trip to southern Australia (see above) as well as some of the well known images from my books The Art Of Diving and Reefs Revealed.
November 2007 - Reefs Revealed Wins BIG
I am delighted and very proud to announce that my new book Reefs Revealed won the Prix Mondial Du Livre D'Image Sous-Marine (World Grand Prize for the best book of underwater photographs) at the 34th Festival Mondial De L'Image Sous Marine in Antibes, France at the weekend. This award is widely considered the ultimate accolade for an underwater photographer and previous winners include some of the greats of underwater photography: Chris Newbert, Kurt Amsler, David Doubilet, Tony Wu and Laurent Ballesta. Books are a lot of hard work and this is certainly the most satisfying award I have won for my photography. I would also like to thank commissioning editor Pete Duncan, designer Mandy McDougal, and all at Constable and Robinson and at Romaine Pages Editions. And of course a big thank you to all those I dived with during the production of this book (see the acknowledgments in the book)!
October 2007 - REEFS REVEALED Launched
Finally! I am proud to announce that my new book, and indeed the first book I have both written and photographed, Reefs Revealed is published this week. Described as a pioneering new volume of underwater photography that reveals coral reefs as never seen before... through revolutionary photography and a marine biologist's revelatory understanding. Although this is a large format picture book, I worked hard to accompany the photographs with well researched and original text, filled with the latest scientific research and my own observations and insights. I would also like to mention a couple of other issues I introduced with the book. First, I offset all the carbon dioxide emissions required for the air travel for the book. Global warming is probably the most serious threat to coral reefs - and as a lot of travel was required for this book this seemed like an appropriate decision. This is not a perfect solution, I know, but I hope it starts a trend in these sorts of books. And second in this age of digital manipulation I chose to mark with a symbol [M], any images in the book that had had their content digitally manipulated. Again, I hope that this is something that becomes more common in these publications.
Reefs Revealed is published (in the UK) by Constable & Robinson and is available at all good bookshops and from Amazon (UK, USA). There are separate Australian, published by ABC Adult Books, and French editions, published by Romaine Pages Editions of the book. The image (right) shows the pygmy seahorse french edition and the clownfish english edition. To get a feel for the content you can browse a brief gallery of some of the spreads here.
October 2007 - Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2007
I am very happy to announce that my photograph Lone Shark was highly commended in the Shell Wildlife Photographer Of The Year 2007. I am particular pleased as this is the third year in a row that my images have featured amongst the winners in this competition. The Wildlife Photographer is the largest and most prestigious competition of its kind in the world, this year attracting over 32,000 entries from 78 countries. This photo was taken in March 2006 on the Wetpixel Bahamas Shark Expedition. My aim was to make the shark look small in its habitat to highlight just how vulnerable they are. So I went for a very simple composition, looking down as it swam across the sand. The Bahamas is one of the few places where sharks have not been decimated by the shark-fin-soup trade, fins are now worth more than $700 per kg. It is one of four of my images that have won awards in this competition that are featured in my new book Reefs Revealed.
October 2007 - Nikon D3 and D300 tests
In mid October 2007 I had the chance to test pre-production versions of two forthcoming DSLRs from Nikon. Both these camera are big technological advances and I am sure that they will be very popular. So I have written up some of my informal thoughts on the strengths of these cameras for underwater photography in the forums on Wetpixel. Please note that these were subjective and not studio conditions tests and also that the camera's were preproduction. That said both cameras were very very impressive. The capabilities of the D3 at high ISO are astonishing.
October 2007 - Interview on BBC Radio 4
On the 24th October I will be a guest on Midweek on BBC Radio 4 to talk about life as an underwater photographer and to try and slip in a few plugs for my new book (see above)! The other guests on the show include actor Charles Dance, retired doctor and author Oscar Craig and former bunny girl and barrister Caroline Wiseman. Midweek is a flagship programme on BBC Radio 4, with an audience of 1.8million. It is broadcast LIVE on Wednesday mornings between 0900-0945, with a shortened evening repeat at 9.30pm. It is presented by the broadcaster, author and Times columnist Libby Purves. It should also be possible to catch the show at any time during the seven days after transmission using the BBC's listen again facility.
October 2007 - Raja Ampat Marine Park Tag 2008
I am very pleased to announce that I won the Raja Ampat Marine Protected Area entrance tag photo competition. The tag, which will be used from the beginning of next year, will be printed 5000 times and attached to the BCs of visiting divers. I actually came first and second in the competition, which was decided by a public vote and this actually gives the marine park the choice of two of my images to use on the tags. At this stage they are thinking of going with the pygmy seahorse. Raja Ampat is a true wonder of the underwater world and I am happy to be contributing in this small to helping in its conservation. If you are a diver and you haven't been there you should go. It is a privilege to see reefs like these. Coincidentally, in 2009 I am running a trip to Raja Ampat, contact Divequest for more information.
October 2007 - Nissan NV200
Over the last 18 months I have been working with Nissan on a concept car designed around my needs as an underwater photographer. It has been a great project for me, not only having a team of talented designers building a car specifically for me (not that I get to keep it) but also because I have always been interested in cars (I read far more car magazines than I do diving magazines!). Obviously such a specific car would never make it into production, but the design study allows and encourages engineers to think in new ways and develop ideas that can be incorporated into their model range. The car will be launched at the Tokyo motor show in October 2007 and I can reveal more about the project after that time. For now you can read the official press release here and see a gallery of images of the car here.
October 2007 - Speaking: Visions and Wildphotos
October is always a busy time with dive shows, conferences and festivals. This month I am speaking at the Visions In the Sea Conference on the 20th and 21st October and at the WildPhotos 2007 event the following weekend on the 25th and 26th October. Both talks are rather fishy. At Visions my talk is Fish photography: expanding the horizons and at Wildphotos I am speaking on the topic of underwater field craft, with the title of How to make friends with fish and when not to. Visions in the Sea is now in its 11th year and I think I have spoken at 7 of them, it is taking place at Kings College, London. Wildphotos is taking place at the Royal Geographic Society, also in London.
October 2007 - Photography in Gran Canaria
In early October I went to the Canary Islands for a short recce trip in preparation for longer trip. Despite only going for three days diving it was a fantastic trip mainly because I was able to meet and dive with some of the island's best underwater photographers. Their hospitality and generosity made the trip great fun and very productive. I am particularly grateful to my new friends David Barrio Luisa Quintanilla for looking after us so well. And I would also like to thanks Claudio Santana, Eva Villagrasa Lara, Enrique Faber, Coralia Morales, Arturo Telle Thiemann, Loli Caballero from Mare Canaria Dive Centre and David and all at Blue Explorers Dive Centre. I hope to be back diving with them soon. Photographic highlights included John Dory, frogfish, the endemic red parrotfish and angel sharks, that have recently been added to the Red List of endangered species. You can see a gallery of my photos from the trip here.
October 2007 - Bite-Back Calendar
I am proud to be one of the contributing photographers in the Bite-Back shark and marine conservation 2008 calendar. The calendar brings together the work of award-winning photographers including David Doubilet, Doug Perrine, Chris Fallows, Jeff Rotman, David Fleetham, Tim Laman, Michael Aw, Brian Skerry, Norbert Wu and myself and combines stunning photography with thought-provoking commentary from the photographers, themselves. As David Doubilet points out: Images have power - sometimes they are the single link that humans have with the sea. The project has enormous significance to the Bite-Back marine conservation group and its campaign director, Graham Buckingham, said: over-fishing is the single biggest threat to the marine environment. It is fuelled by purely by over-consumption and we must shift that balance to stand any chance of ensuring the survival of big fish like sharks, swordfish and marlin. The calendar costs £10 and is available from the Bite-Back website with proceeds going to Bite-Back's marine conservation efforts.
October 2007 - Interview in The Observer
The Observer Sunday newspaper recently published an interview with me in their Me And My Travels by Clive Wilkinson. The interview discusses the fun, frustrations and responsibilities of being a traveling underwater photographer. The Observer is one of the UK's leading Sunday Newspapers and the Me And My Travels series has featured a variety of authors, photographers and television personalities. I am keen to correct the article that I was not named Wildlife Photographer of the Year in 2005, as is erroneously stated at the end of the article, but I did win two awards in the competition that year. You can read an online version of the interview here.
October 2007 - The Art Of Diving USA
I am pleased to announce that the North American edition of The Art Of Diving went on sale on the 1st October. The North American edition differs from the European editions by having a hard cover and also more detailed information in the captions. It is published by the Lyons Press and is available on Amazon.com as well as at other good book stores. The content of the book has been updated slightly for the North American audience (mainly the spelling!). The images are the same as in the European versions.
September 2007 - Sardegna Subacquea
At the end of September I travelled to Olbia in Sardinia to be part of the jury for the Astrea D'Oro Fotosub event. This was my second year of involvement in the event and it was great to meet my friends from Anthias Diving, Location Sardinia and top Italian underwater photographer, Paolo Fossati, again. This on the day underwater photography competition, organised by the Centro di Cultura Ambientale Alessandro Spano is based in the spectacular marine protected area of the island of Tavolara. The Astrea D'Oro gold trophy, worth 2000 Euros, was won this year by Mauro Cabiddu for a stunning portfolio of six images. You can see photos from the 2006 event here. I will add a link for the 2007 event when it is online.
September 2007 - Photography in Bali
I have just returned from a very productive trip to Bali. Like many people, Bali is my favourite spot in Indonesia because of the friendly people, the beautiful scenery, the enchanting atmosphere and its strong cultural identity. And of course, some first class diving! Bali offers some excellent critter diving, and plenty of rarities, like the Pterois kodipungi lionfish pictured here. The main aim of this trip was to shoot underwater diver photos, which few people shoot in SE Asia waters, with most photographers concentrating on the marine life. I must say many thanks to Scubapro for lending me the most up-to-date divekit for my model for this trip. The other aim of the trip was to visit a variety of dive resorts to cover them in dive magazines. We stayed at and dived with Bali Hai, Scuba Seraya Resort, Tauch Terminal and Alam Anda resorts. FiNS Magazine will be running five blog diary installments from my trip. You can see a gallery of photographs from this trip here.
September 2007 - New Scubapro Global Website
I am proud to say that my photographs are being used as the backgrounds of the new Scubapro and UWATEC global website in multiple languages around the world. The most obvious image is my photograph of schooling stingrays, but click around and you will see plenty more. Most of the images come from photography for my first book, The Art Of Diving. I am a big fan of Scubapro's diving equipment and chose to use most of their products for myself before they started lending me kit for my model shoots.
August 2007 - Magic Filters 2 Years Old
Magic Filters is now two years old. The original Magic filter came about because I wanted to develop a filter to extend the types of images I could take. While refining the filter in the Red Sea with Peter Rowlands, other photographers who saw our images begged us not to keep the filter for ourselves. And so Magic Filters was born. Despite the name, there is no Magic. All our filters are custom recipes that we have found produce the best results while taking photographs underwater. Our biggest satisfaction is seeing the new types of underwater photos people are producing with the filter. In a short space of time images take with Magic filters have appeared in numerous dive magazines, books and advertising campaigns. Perhaps the most well known Magic Filter photographs are Todd Essick's Bahamas Shark and model photographs, which have been published around the world. We would like to think that our filters have revolutionised available light photography underwater.
August 2007 - Advanced Guide to Digital Underwater Photography
I am pleased to say that I have contributed a chapter to the new book An Advanced Guide To Digital Underwater Photography by Michael Aw and Mattieu Meur. My chapter is on shooting in Ambient Light With Filters, and the book also discusses many techniques both for shooting underwater and for processing them on the computer. An interesting and original feature in this book is a special section that features images and secrets from some of the worldÕs top underwater photographers, where I am proud for my photos to be featured alongside those of David Doubilet, Doug Perrine and Stephen Frink. This book is the follow up to the successful An Essential Guide To Digital Underwater Photography and is sure to be a popular choice for underwater photographers.
August 2007 - DIVE Magazine 100 issues
Congratulations to all my friend's at DIVE Magazine on reaching their 100th Issue. I am proud to be a contributing editor to this widely respected diving magazine. I am also pleased to report that I was asked to submit an image for a special Big Shot feature for this issue, which was written by Colin Doeg. We decided to discuss my Ghost Pipefish family portrait, that was shot with my newly invented fisheye-teleconverter technique for my forthcoming book, Reefs Revealed. It is a treat to encounter a group of ghost pipefish and usually people shoot them against a black background, which I feel fails to communicate much about the environment they live in. The fisheye lens used in conjunction with a teleconverter proved perfect for getting a detailed foreground of the ghost pipefish and, with the help of a long exposure, I was able to set them nicely in their environment. The photo was taken on a trip to West Papua, Indonesia, and was part of the final photography for the book. Graham Abbott was the dive guide for the trip and his dedication massively increased my productivity.
August 2007 - Photographs in Nikon News
I was pleased to be asked by Nikon Europe to provide images for a special edition Nikon News charting the 30 year history of the magazine and the developments in photography and cameras (Nikon ones) over those years. The timeline featured two of my underwater images alongside sports, wildlife, portrait and journalism images from many famous photographers taken during the last thirty years. The picture here was used to demonstrate the advances that digital cameras have brought in allowing new techniques, in this case filter photography underwater, to develop. The other image that they selected of mine was an older film image, used to represent Nikon's historical links with underwater photography. It was also nice to get paid by Nikon after many years of filling their coffers when buying more cameras and lenses - alas they are still rather ahead on the deal!
August 2007 - Hamlets in inaugural Ocean Geographic
I please to announce that my article on the evolution, speciation and reproductive behaviour of hamlets was published in the inaugural edition of the new high quality periodical Ocean Geographic. I am particularly proud to be featured in the first issue of this almanac of the sea alongside such widely respected underwater image makers as Doug Perrine, David Doubilet, Mike Aw and Wyland. It was also nice to be able to write an article with a strong science content, which I hope the readers found entertaining and informative. I am looking forward to contributing to future issues of this magazine.
August 2007 - Interview in Duiken
For those of you who speak Dutch, please check out a 5 page interview with me in the magazine Duiken, and tell me what I said! I had actually thought that this interview was printed in the issue with one of my photos on the cover a few months ago. From what I remember the interview, written by underwater photographer Ron Offermans discusses underwater photography equipment and techniques as well as the range of Magic Filters that are revolutionising available light underwater photography. In this interview I also discuss new underwater photography techniques I am working on, such as the teleconverter fisheye technique that has been generating a lot of interest. Unfortunately for English speakers the article is in Dutch, but you can see it here.
August 2007 - Sardinia
I had a fun trip to Sardinia at the end of July. A real highlight was diving the Second World War wreck of KT12, complete with trucks and a deck gun. The KT12 was sunk by the British submarine, HMS Safari, which sunk a string of vessels off Sardinia's east coast during the war. The wreck lies in 30m of water and sits upright on the seabed. She's a great dive. Diving this wreck was a particular highlight for me because it is very close to my girlfriend's family home, in fact we were diving with Centro Sub Astrea who taught her to dive. Eleonora's grandfather even remembered that two of the torpedos that missed the KT12 ended up on the beach. Coincidentally the HMS Safari sank just off the south coast not far from where we live in England. I will be back in Sardinia at the end of September as a judge for Sardegna Subacquea 2007 Fotosub competition, get in touch if you interested in going.
July 2007 - Scubapro Summer Promotion
I was not planning to write anything about this on my website, as my photos are regularly used in advertising and promotional material with little fanfare. But I have received several emails from people who have seen this flyer in dive shops in the UK. I guess it demonstrates the power of the bikini - they don't normally write to me about my photos! Anyway this provides a good opportunity to say congratulations to my friend Anna, who stars in the picture, who has just passed her PhD. The picture was taken during the shoots for The Art Of Diving on a deserted island in the Maldives. For those (guys) who want to see a higher resolution version, you can download the PDF here.
July 2007 - FiNS Photo Special
FiNS Magazine has just published its first annual Photo special and features my photographs alongside some of my favourite underwater photographers. The five featured photographers are Eric Cheng, Takako Uno, Stephen Wong, Tony Wu and Takaji Ochi. Despite all the portfolios being themed on marine life they really show the diversity of styles of underwater photography. The images are accompanied by lighthearted interviews, which certainly make an amusing read. Coincidentally, three of us (Eric, Tony and I) were just together on the Wetpixel shark trip to the Bahamas, see the news item below, although luckily we weren't eating cockroaches. You can download the article as a PDF here.
July 2007 - Wetpixel/JASA shark trip
I survived! I have to say I was slightly nervous heading out for the Wetpixel shark trip 2007 after the too close for comfort encounters on the 2006 effort. But in the end we actually had the problem of not being able to attract the sharks we wanted. We travelled right across the Bahamas and couldn't find Oceanic Whitetips for love nor money. It is all par for the course for a wildlife photographer. Luckily Jim Abernethy still provided tigers, lemons, duskies and reef sharks in abundance and it was a very productive trip. Just not with the species we were after! We had a great gang on board and I can't wait for next year's Wetpixel shark trip when hopefully lady luck will be more on our side. You can see a gallery from the trip here.
June 2007 - Digital Techniques Workshop 2007
My UWP Digital Techniques Workshop in the Red Sea on MV Whirlwind was a great success and myself and the gang had a massively productive and really enjoyable time. This was my only digital photography teaching week in 2007 and I am really enjoyed it, even though it was very tiring by the end. We certainly enjoyed the photo opportunities on the wrecks, reef and schools. The photo actually shows the gang from last year, although many of the same group came back for more. We worked through lots of filter photography, both in colour, with the Magic Filter, and in black and white using various contrast filters. We also shot fish spawning behaviour, the schools and most really concentrated on getting those blues right in camera, to produce stunning backgrounds for their scenics and portraits without the need for photoshop!
June 2007 - WildPhotos October 2007
I am pleased to confirm that I have been asked to be a speaker at WildPhotos 2007, on 26th and 27th October at the Royal Geographical Society, in London. The theme of the event is Exploring the power of nature photography, and it offers a chance to learn how to take, improve, publish, earn a living from, and make a difference with nature photographs. The two-day event brings together many of the worldÕs best wildlife and landscape photographers plus leading photographic agents and publishers to offer insights, tips and visions to appeal to everyone with an interest in nature imagery. The other speakers include Doug Allan, Karl Ammann, Mark Carwardine, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Tim Laman, Frans Lanting and Colin Prior. Also presenting their work and skills will be winners from this year's Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, the results of which will be announced the day before WildPhotos. WildPhotos is a Wildscreen initiative, in partnership with Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year. You can read all about the event here.
June 2007 - Underwater Advertising
An amusing email turned up recently showing me one of my underwater photographs on display, underwater. Swedish advertising agency King decided that the ideal place to display one of their posters advertising diving holidays to the Red Sea was at a popular dive site in the cold and murky waters of the Baltic Sea. The advert, for Swedish travel agent Ving, encourages divers to escape the Scandinavian cold and head to Hurghada from just 3975 Krona. The poster features one of my photographs taken in the Red Sea with the Magic Filter.
June 2007 - Hilton and The Art Of Diving
No. This is nothing to do with Paris Hilton's prison reading list. Instead, I am pleased to announce a collaboration between Ultimate Sports the publishers of my first book, The Art Of Diving, and Hilton Worldwide Resorts. Many Hilton Resorts have dive centres, in fact I stayed at the Nuwieba Coral Hilton in January, and The Art Of Diving will be used to help promote scuba diving. Check out the Hilton Resorts website for more details. You can read more about The Art Of Diving here.
May 2007 - Back from Sabah
For much of May I was away diving around the islands of Sipadan, Kapalai and Mabul in Sabah, Malaysia. This area is remarkable and certainly is one of the diving wonders of the world. Most of my time was spent running my Quest For Diversity trip for Divequest, although I did manage a few days there on my own shooting for myself. The trip was very productive photographically: you can see my photos from Sipadan here and from Mabul and Kapalai here. You can also read my FiNS Blog of my trip here: part 1, part 2 and part 3.
May 2007 - Ocean Geographic
I am proud to have been recently invited to be one of the honorary editors of the new high quality periodical Ocean Geographic. I am particularly proud to be part of such a distinguished editorial board that contains many of the people I most admire: Doug Perrine, David Doubilet, Dr Gerry Allen, Dr Carden Wallace, Emory Kristof, Stan Waterman, Wyland & Michael AW. Ocean Geographic explores the dynamics of our ocean planet. As all on Earth is connected with the sea, Ocean Geographic focuses on getting to know who is who in the sea, allowing you to appreciate the complexity of the oceanic life forms that make up the vast biospheres, as well as understanding the environmental influences and climatic conditions that that make our planet a hospitable place. The first issue of Ocean Geographic will be launched in June 2007.
May 2007 - UWP Magazine Cover
I am pleased that one of my photos has been selected for the cover of Underwater Photography Magazine (UWP Mag) issue 36. I have been a regular contributor to UWP since its first issue and have written more than 50 articles for the magazine (including reviews). Although UWP is published by my friend and partner in Magic Filters I actually do not have any involvement in the magazine beyond being a contributor. That said, I am very proud to be a regular contributor to this magazine. UWP Mag is a free web magazine on underwater photography, published bimonthly and read by more than 10,000 registered subscribers.
May 2007 - Cold Mustard?
Well not at all actually, thanks to the superb efforts of O'Three drysuits and Fourth Element's thermals suits I was really warm. I have been putting off cold water diving for many years, but having recently completed a big project on coral reefs I no longer have any excuses not to start broadening my portfolio. And for me there was no better place for my first drysuit dive than in the county I grew up in, Devon. I absolutely loved my first day of UK diving, and managed three shallow dives, two of which without being encumbered by a buddy (I did not dive solo on my first ever drysuit dive!). This first day was all about building experience and a thick, globular plankton bloom meant that I left my camera on the boat. From what I see, I feel that much of the photography in British waters is quite formulaic, and I am excited to see how my approach and photographic style translates in British conditions. I want my early photography in the UK to be free of expectation and deliverables, but once I have built a portfolio that I am happy with, I will make sure it is up on this website. Check back soon.
April 2007 - Art Of Diving, North America
I am happy to announce that North American edition of The Art Of Diving will be on sale from the 1st October 2007 in bookshops across the USA and Canada. Unlike the British edition the new book is Hard Cover and contains more detailed captions of the photographs. The book is already available for pre-orders at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca at a 33% discount. It will also be possible to order this special edition of the book here in the UK through the Amazon.com website, once the book is published. Scuba diving has become one of the worlds most popular adventure sports, with now more than 20 million registered divers. Enthusiasts passion grows from their exploration of a completely magical and otherworldly dimension under the sea. Each dive is a fresh experience, revealing a different diorama, captured in full color in this magnificent book. With a perfect blend of art and science, the text and photography recreates the emotional and sensual dimension of diving as well as conveying the intellectual fascination of meeting unusual underwater creatures and observing the condition of marine environments. Read more in the books section of this website.
April 2007 - Seahorse Photo Exhibition
If you are in London, you can see one of my photos as part of the the Guylian Seahorses of the World photo exhibition currently on show at London Zoo, aiming to raise awareness of the work of Project Seahorse. The exhibition, is on display in the aquarium of London Zoo - open every day, 10am to 5.30pm, until 1 June. Project Seahorse helps people learn more about these remarkable creatures and to raise awareness of the threat to their habitat. Guylian is famous for its Original Belgian Chocolate Seashells, loved by premium chocolate connoisseurs around the world. I do not consider myself a connoisseurs, but they are yummy. For those who cannot make it to London, you can see a preview of the exhibition online here.
April 2007 - Fine Art Prints
They are finally here. I am very pleased to be able to announce that my fine art prints are now ready. I have spent a lot of time researching papers and printing methods to find a paper that really works well with the look of both my colour and black & white photographs. At present I have 27 photos in the print collection, all are professionally produced giclee prints on semi-gloss Crane Museo Silver Rag 100% Cotton 300gsm Digital Fibre Paper. Each print is signed, numbered and approved by me. They are available in two sizes - 450x300mm (approx. 18x12") and 300x200mm (approx. 12x8") printed with border on oversized paper, prices are £80 and £45, respectively (not including postage and packing) and can be purchased from this website from my new secure online shop. You can browse the galleries of prints here.
April 2007 - Congratulations to Eleo
Even here on my own website, I am being usurped. I am very pleased to announce that my girlfriend Eleonora has recently been picking up plenty of awards for her underwater photography - damn her. Already this year she has won two months of the BSAC Travel Club novice competition coming first and second one month, but she also recently beat me and many other top UK underwater photographers to come first equal in a monthly BSoUP Focus On competition on the subject of abstracts. Not bad considering she has less than 10 dives with a camera! All her winning pictures were taken with a Nikon D80 in an Ikelite housing with an Ikelite DS125 strobe - a great DSLR beginners set up.
March 2007 - Cover: FiNS Magazine
I am pleased to say that one of my walking shark photos has been chosen for the cover of the latest issue of FiNS Magazine. The magazine runs a feature about my trip to remotest West Papua to find this newly discovered species of shark, which currently does not have a scientific name. The sharks common name comes from its habit of walking across the seabed on its fins, a characteristic is shares with several other species of Epaulette sharks. The issue of FiNS also contains the latest installment of my regular Talking Megapixels column.
March 2007 - New book: Dive Red Sea
I am very excited to say that Dive Red Sea has just been published, a new large format dive guide book for the Red Sea that includes more than 150 of my photos, including on the front and back covers. Dive Red Sea was written by Simon Rogerson and John McIntyre, covering all eight countries that border the Red Sea, is about 350 pages long and only costs £20! For me it was a chance to share many of my photos that have not been seen elsewhere, even on my website. When flicking through it there were a couple of shots that made me go wow and stop to find out who had taken them, only to discover that they were mine. The book also contains many Magic filter shots (by me and others), which are really suited to this sort of publication for capturing the "what-its-really-like look" of shipwrecks and divesites. You can see some sample pages here and can buy a copy from Amazon here. Read more in the books section of this website.
March 2007 - Diver Awards: The Underwater Photographer
Congratulations to Martin Edge on winning best publication (books and DVDs) in the prestigious Diver Magazine Awards at the LIDS show. Martin's book is widely regarded as the best on the techniques of digital underwater photography and I am very proud to have contributed a chapter to it on the subject of filters. I am doubly pleased as The Art Of Diving came third, with Diver Magazine commenting that "this year we reckon you had more top-quality publications than usual from which to choose, and the three finalists were each the sort of volume you might treasure as a work of reference". Read more in the books section of this website.
March 2007 - Dive Shows
This month we have two big diving shows in the UK. First up, I am heading to the London International Dive Show (LIDS) on Saturday 10th March. I'll certainly be spending some of my time on stand 339 belonging to Ultimate Sports signing copies of The Art Of Diving and also Dive Red Sea (see above). I won't be at LIDS on Sunday as England are playing the French - gotta have priorities! The following weekend, 17th-18th March, I am up at the National Exhibition Centre to speak at the Ordnance Survey Outdoors Show, joining the likes of Ray Mears, Brian Blessed and Bill Oddie. On the Saturday I am speaking on the subject of Coral Reefs Revealed and on the Sunday I am presenting the awards for the BUIF - the British Underwater Image Festival.
February 2007 - Cover: DIVE Magazine
I am pleased to say that one of my pictures is on the cover of the March issue of DIVE magazine. The image is actually an older one, taken from The Art Of Diving. In fact it shows Nick Hanna. It was taken in 2004 with my D100. It is often surprising the types of images that are required on the cover to communicate the content of a magazine. I certainly never marked this one down as cover, although now it is laid out it makes perfect sense. I also have a number images inside the magazine to accompany an article on the Cayman Islands BSAC branch.
February 2007 - Carbon neutral travel
Coral Reefs are particularly vulnerable to the treats of global warming and the greenhouse effect driven by elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations. On 2nd February the IPCC released its forth assessment report stating it is very likely that climate change is caused by human activities and the current atmospheric CO2 levels (>380ppm) far exceed the natural range over the last 650000 years (180-300ppm), and that the primary source of the CO2 increase is fossil fuel use. Wherever I travel I hear people comment about climate change. 11 of the last 12 years rank among the warmest 12 years since records began in 1850. And during the last decade I have seen many corals bleach and some go on to die as the result of unusually warm water conditions. Furthermore, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere leads to acidification of the ocean, which has the potential to stop corals laying down their skeletons and dissolving away reefs. As a wildlife photographer based in the UK I clock up many air miles traveling to and from far off reefs to make my photographs. And all this travel produces more CO2. As Nick Hanna put it in The Art Of Diving by traveling to see reefs we are running the risk of loving them to death. So with Nick's encouragement I started offsetting all the carbon emissions from my air travel, backdating over the last 18 months, by investing in forest restoration and renewable energy projects equivalent to the 18.5 tonnes of CO2 my flying has contributed. I hope other regular travelers will consider making these offsets too, try Climate Care or Carbon Neutral for more details.
February 2007 - Cover: Duiken Magazine
The February issue of Duiken magazine from Holland features my image of courting angelfish on the cover. It is
February 2007 - Magic Filters online store
Magic Filters entered its third year of trading in January, having been set up by myself and Peter Rowlands in the summer of 2005. We now have three product lines (original Magic, Auto-Magic and GreenWater Magic) and thanks to our customers recommending our filters to their friends we have now sold our filters in more than 60 countries. We are always trying to improve our business and in February I integrated an online store into the Magic Filters website, with secure online payment processing handled by PayPal. We have also recently started Magic Filters as an official company, previously we traded within Peter's existing company PR Productions. This will make little difference to you as a customer, although it does mean that Magic Filters are here to stay in the world of underwater photography.
January 2007 - Speaking at the Copenhagen Diveshow
At the end of January (26-28th) I travelled to Copenhagen to speak at the CPH Diveshow. I had never been to Denmark before and I had a great time and met lots of interesting people - both underwater photographers and non-photographers. Also speaking at the show were deep wreck photographer and black and white master Leigh Bishop. This was the second time I have spoken with Leigh, and we both agreed we made a good double act because we both have such different approaches which shows what a diverse activity underwater photography can be. The digital underwater photography seminars were chaired by my friend Ingvar Eliasson. You can read more (in Danish) here and also see a short video here
January 2007 - The Art Of Diving - Willy Volk review
Willy Volk, editor of Divester.com and now my new best friend, has just published a review of The Art Of Diving. To continue in Willy's words "the result of their collaboration was tremendous: from the endless creative juices of these two aesthetes came the magnificent book, The Art of Diving. Never before has a book about scuba diving been so beautiful, so literate, and so spot on". Praise aside, I am so pleased that this reviewer really got what The Art Of Diving is about "Hanna and Mustard have put together a tender document suggesting that it doesn't matter much how you do it, so long as you treasure the experience... more than an overview of the underwater world, more than a history of the sport we all love, The Art of Diving is an elegant treatise on how to get more out of diving". You can read Willy's review here.
January 2007 - Photography in the Gulf of Aqaba
There aren't many better ways to kick start the year than by heading off diving. And so I decided to hop on a plane and head to Egypt for a week in the sun and more importantly in the sea. Egypt offers fantastic value for money at this time of year, and I booked up with Longwood Holidays for a week staying at the Coral Hilton in Nuweiba. This resort, and the Emperor Divers dive centre is a perennial favourite for a number of UK underwater photographers and I really enjoyed my time there, especially diving on their small house reef - which is an excellent spot for underwater photography. While in Nuweiba I also dived with underwater photographer Simon Appel, who runs Scuba Divers La Sirene and has been in Nuweiba for ever, who was kind enough to show me some of his favourite spots. It was pleasingly productive trip, although a little chilly at times. I said in a recent interview I wanted to do more cold water diving, and I hope that this counts!
January 2007 - Greater Meaning Of Water on Deeper Blue
Back in 2005 I took some production stills, underwater of course, for a new freediving film called The Greater Meaning Of Water and I even managed to get a Cinematographer IMDB listing as a result. The film should be finished this year and will be released to film festivals and on DVD. You can see a trailer for the movie on the GMW website and if you look very carefully in the teaser trailer you can see me ruining one of the shots. The film is written and directed by Sky Christopherson and stars Justin Flint Williford, who has just done an interview on Deeper Blue discussing the project. It is well worth a look.
December 2006 - Photography in the Cayman Islands
In December I travelled to the Cayman Islands for 10 days to fit in some extra photography for a new project I am working on. It was a long way to go for just over a week of photography, but since I knew exactly what I wanted I found it a very productive trip. I always enjoying diving in Cayman's balmy clear waters and this was a rare trip where my girlfriend was able to come along with me. The clarity of the waters in Cayman, while excellent for underwater photography, can be slighting intimidating after diving in low viz waters of Indonesia! As well as shooting for myself, I also took along a new Nikon D80 DLSR and Ikelite housing (thank you to Ikelite and Cameras Underwater) to write an article about the use of TTL, which has now been published in UWP issue 34.
December 2006 - On the trail of the Walking Shark
I have just returned from a fantastic and major shoot in remote West Papua in Indonesia. I was away for nearly three weeks and took over 4500 images. The trip first explored the remote and phenomenal reefs and mangroves around the island of Misool in Raja Ampat. These reefs are definitely the best I have ever seen, high in diversity and biomass and not showing any signs of human impact, they were a real privilege to photograph. We then went on to the FakFak region of the southern Bird's Head peninsula. This latter area was first explored by scientists earlier in the year and they dubbed the area a species factory after they dicovered more than 50 new species in the area. Well known fish biologist Dr Gerry Allen broke his own record for the number of fish species counted on a single divesite in the FakFak region earlier this year - recording 330 species on one of the sites I photographed. While I was there I had the chance to photograph an undescribed species of epaulette shark, which is known by the nickname of the Walking Shark because it hunts its prey of crustaceans and molluscs by walking on its fins across the seabed (see the photo). This trip was a major shoot for a new project I am working on and I am afraid all the photos will be under wraps until later next year. Although I will probably publish the shark images sooner than that. We travelled on the lovely new boat MY Seahorse and our diving was run by Diving 4 Images, who escorted the scientific trip earlier in the year. You can read more on the FiNS website.
December 2006 - Presenting at the NELOS Fetsival
Directly on my return from West Papua I was off to Belgium to speak at the bi-annual Nelos Festival. This is a fantastic and friendly event and I enjoyed my time there immensely (even though I seemed to be endlessly signing copies of The Art Of Diving, until they ran out!). I spoke on both days of the festival, talking about Fisheye Photography on the first day, including a section on my new fisheye plus teleconverter technique that generated a great deal of interest. On the second day I spoke to a packed audience about Fish Photography. This talk was particularly well received and produced much enthusiasm and debate afterwards between myself and the other photographers at the event. The flight home, my seventh in the week, was a bit hairy flying across the North Sea during a strong winter storm!
December 2006 - Interview in Adrenaliin
On my return home from Indonesia I was greeted with a copy of an interview I did for Adrenaliin Magazine during my trip to Estonia. It is always strange to see interviews about me that I can't read a word of, although I can recognise my own name and also Elizabeth II, who I guess is the Queen!! For those who can read Estonia, or would like to see the pictures in a larger format you can download a PDF of the article here. The interview was written by fellow photographer Kaido Haagen.
November 2006 - Presenting my photos to the Queen
Underwater photography has taken me to some unusual places, but I never imagined that it would take me to meet the Queen. I recently had the great honour to meet Her Majesty The Queen and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, to show them some of my underwater photos, chat about underwater photography and to present them with a book. The meeting came about because I was invited by the British Council in Estonia to represent the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition and to present the Queen with their official gift of the Portfolio book. The Queen is a keen photographer herself and congratulated me on winning in the competition and asked me about the challenges of taking pictures underwater. I actually spoke more about the advantages; underwater we can move in three dimensions and therefore can approach the subject from any direction we choose, I told her. Imagine what land photography would be like if we could fly. The Queen seemed amused by this answer. The Duke of Edinburgh, well known for his patronage of the WWF, was more interested in the species shown in the photos and where the photos were taken. I explained that the Snapper photo (which you can see in the photo on the right) was taken in Egypt, explaining that the Red Sea is so lush and colourful below the waves, quite a contrast to the desert above. After meeting the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, I also spoke about my photography to The Rt Hon Margaret Beckett MP, The British Foreign Secretary, who was accompanying the Queen during her state visit to Estonia. It was a fantastic experience to meet the Queen, who despite dominating any rooms she enters, has a knack of making you feel incredibly at ease chatting away to her, as if you are only the two there. Click on the image to see a larger version.
November 2006 - Visions in the Sea, 2006
I am one of the few people have attended all the Visions in the Sea Conferences and was very proud to be asked to be one of the speakers at the 10th Visions in the Sea Conference in London in November. This year's conference brought together a stella selection of speakers: Peter Scoones, Amos Nachoum, Michael Aw, Andrea and Antonella Ferrari, Pete Atkinson, Martin Edge, Peter Rowlands, John Collins and myself. The two day festival was very motivating and I can't wait to get back in the water and get to work on all the new ideas I have. Congratulations to Ocean Optics for 10 years of Visions, I hope that it continues for many more decades.
November 2006 - Cover: Tauchen Magazine - two in a row
I am very happy that Tauchen Magazine have again chosen one of my photos for the cover of their magazine. The image shows a hawksbill turtle and a diver in Sipadan and was taken in May. Amusingly the magazine have moved the diver slightly to the right, compared with the original image. Tauchen is Europe's largest diving magazine and this is the second month in a row that one of my images has been on the cover of the magazine.
October 2006 - Plongeur D'Argent in Antibes
There are many underwater photography competitions around the world, but I choose to only enter the two that I think are the most prestigious and most important: the Wildlife Photographer of the Year and World Festival of Underwater Photography in Antibes, France. These two competitions attract entries from the top professionals and getting an award really is a special achievement and a fabulous endorsement of your work. I am very excited to say that for the last two years I have won awards in both (of course I do not expect this luck to last, but I am enjoying it while it does). At this year's Antibes Festival I was awarded the Plongeur D Argent for my black and white image Stingray Sunset taken on New Year's Day in Grand Cayman. This is my sixth award from le Festival in Antibes, I won my first award there in 2002.
October 2006 - Shell Wildlife Photographer Of The Year 2006
I am very pleased to announce that once again I am an award winner at the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year (2006). This competition is the most prestigious nature photography competition in the world, and each year the winning entries are chosen from about 20000 photos from professional and amateur photographers from all around the world. This year, my photo Snappers in Synchrony was highly commended in the Animal Behaviour Category. I am very proud to win another award in Animal Behaviour as behavioural shots are seen as the most challenging type of image by many wildlife photographers.
October 2006 - Estonia visit
During my short visit to Estonia, where I was invited to represent the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition, I had the chance to do many media interviews. Most exciting was doing my first live television interview on Estonia's National Broadcaster ETV. The interview lasted for 15 minutes and I had the chance to show a number of my photographs and work in plugs for the Art Of Diving and Magic Filters. I was feeling like an old pro. The interview was broadcast twice, once live and then repeated later in the day. After doing the TV, I did a recorded interview for the Culture and Arts show on Klassika Raadio. Then I was whisked off to the KUMU art museum to give an informal talk about the Wildlife Photographer exhibition, followed by a lecture on Coral Reefs. Finally I did two interviews for Estonian magazines: Cheese a photography magazine and Adrenaliin a sports and diving magazine.
October 2006 - The UK Dive Show 2006
I have just returned from a fun but busy weekend at the Diveshow at the NEC, where I was signing copies of The Art Of Diving in various places and chatting to many people about digital underwater photography. It was very nice to see so many friends from the UK and all over the world at the show! And to those who bought the book I hope that you enjoy it!
October 2006 - Book: my images in Ocean
I am pleased to announce that I have just heard that a selection of my photographs are used in the new illustrated reference book Ocean written by Robert Dinwiddie and produced by publishers by Dorling Kindersley. Ocean is a large format, full colour, hard back reference book on all aspects of the Oceans and costs £30. This is the second book in the DK Reference Library series that I have contributed image to, my photos having already appeared in Earth, which was published in 2004. Fabien Cousteau, a featured contributor to The Art Of Diving wrote the foreword to Ocean.
October 2006 - Cover: Tauchen Magazine
I seem to be doing rather well for covers at the moment. The current issue of Tauchen Magazine, Europe's largest diving magazine, has one of my pictures on the cover - this one showing my buddy Denis Antippa photographing inside the wreck of the Ulysses in the Red Sea. Another shot from this series was used on the cover of Sport Diver Magazine earlier this year, and also appears in The Art Of Diving. I also have an article about Shark Reef at Ras Mohammed inside the magazine.
October 2006 - Sardinian Workshop & Competition
I am just back from a week in Sardinia running a digital photography course for my friends Alan James and Heather Hammond. Alan has run an underwater photo workshop in Sardinia for the last 6 years and this year had to pull out quite late because he is moving house and shop! I was happy to fill in for him for personal reasons (those who know me personally will know exactly what my personal Sardinia reason is!). Anyway it was a great week and a very different and enjoyable diving experience for me. The trip was organised by the excellent Location Sardinia and and the diving by the fantastic Anthias Diving. At the end of the week I was one of the judges for the Astrea D'Oro International Photo Competition and I very much enjoyed meeting many top Italian photographers.
October 2006 - Cover: BBC Wildlife Supplement
I am pleased to announce that my photo of schooling stingrays is the main image on the cover of BBC Wildlife Magazine's travel supplement about the Cayman Islands (and in fact I also have two thumbnails on the cover too). The supplement makes excellent reading and I learned a great deal about the terrestrial wildlife of the islands. In all I have 10 of my pictures in the supplement and also have a picture inside the main magazine, which I will talk more about later in the month...
September 2006 - Cayman Digital Madness
I have just returned from an excellent trip to Grand Cayman. The first week was to continue my study of the mass annual coral spawning. We added a new species to our spawning dataset this year, seeing Massive Starlet Coral spawning, and also saw the regulars including Brain Coral and three species of Star Coral. The branching Elkhorn and Staghorn corals that were flatten on our study site by hurricane Ivan, still haven't spawned since the storm, and they appear to be putting all their energy into growning - some have grown about 15cm in just two years, you can read more in the Cayman Compass here. The second week saw me teaching as part of Cayman Digital Madness organised by Scuba Diving Magazine from the USA. This was a great week with a fantastic bunch of photographers, who made the event a total pleasure for me. You can read Scuba Diving's event diary here and see a gallery of the winning pictures here, there is also an active discussion on Wetpixel here. It was also a real treat to get to know Cathy Church, Stephen Frink and all the gang from the magazine. Sign me up for more.
September 2006 - Cover: FiNS Magazine
I am pleased to announce that one of my photos from my May trip to Sipadan, Kapalai and Mabul is on the cover of FiNS Magazine this month. That trip was organised by FiNS Magazine and this picture was shot specifically as a cover. I love it when a plan comes together. Although taken on Sipadan, this photo shows a Hawksbill rather than the more abundant green turtles. The magazine also features my Talking Megapixels column, this month on a Sense of Style.
September 2006 - Red Sea Workshop
FULL ALREADY! Issue 32 of Underwater Photography Magazine features an advert for my Digital Techniques Workshop 2007 - once again in the Red Sea in June. I realise this is a long way off - but such is the demand that it is already filling up fast. If you are interested in coming please send me an email - at this stage it is just to register interest - no need to pay anything. I will be offering places on the workshop on a strict first come, first served basis - based on the order I receive these emails. I am sorry I have not replied to most of your emails - I will in a month or so, when I start to organise the trip. You can read about this year's trip (back in June) in UWP Issue 31.
September 2006 - Divequest trip to Bali
I am just back from the beautiful island of Bali, where I was running once again my A Quest For Diversity: the Secrets of Bali for Divequest. Bali is a beautiful, interesting and charming island and a wonderful destination for diving. We dived in four areas during the trip: Menjangan/Secret Bay, Puri Jati, Tulamben/Seraya and Padangbai/Nusa Penida and saw creatures ranging from pygmy seahorses to the enigmatic Mola mola the world's heaviest bony fish. We also saw many weird and wonderful creatures such as mimic octopus, blue-ring octopus, ghost pipefish, frogfish, sea snakes and tiger, Coleman's and harlequin shrimps. You can read a report on the trip on Fins Online here and see a gallery of my images from the trip here.
August 2006 - Two new Magic Filters
I am excited to announce that we have expanded the Magic Filters range to three different filters. The original Magic filter is now one year old and I have invented two new filters to add to the range. The first available now is the Auto-Magic, which is made specifically for digital compact cameras. We have designed this filter to make the great colours of Magic images simple for everybody produce. This filter works with the cameraÕs automatic settings, so all you need to do is turn off your flash and point and shoot for vibrantly coloured images. The second is the Greenwater Magic filter, for which Peter Rowlands has done all the development dives. This filter is designed for low viz, green waters, like those around the UK, and we are promises to revolutionise available light photography in these conditions. Check out the galleries on the Magic Filters website to see the results.
August 2006 - New 05/06 portfolio online
I have revamped the gallery page of this website and added a new gallery of my favourite 50 images taken during the last 12 months. This gallery compliments the similar one that I created this time last year with my my 50 favourite shots taken prior to that date. I hope to make this an annual event - creating an overview gallery from of my best images from the previous 12 months. Please take a look at my favourite images from the last 12 months here.
August 2006 - NELOS Festival
I am pleased to announce that I am a guest speaker at the Nelos Film Festival in Belgium in December, and one of my images is being used on the promotional material for the event. The Nelos Festival is in its 18th year and celebrates and showcases both still and video images of the underwater world, it also incorporates a competition for both formats - the closing date is the 27th October. Other speakers include cameramen Peter Scoones, Andy McLeod and still photographers Christoph Gerigk, Willem Kolvoort and Linda Pitkin. The festival takes place in Belgium on the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd December 2006 and is sponsored by Duiken and Duik Magazines.
July 2006 - DIVE Contributing Editor
I am very proud to announce that DIVE Magazine have invited me to become a contributing editor. This position is in recognition of my regular publication record in the magazine, most recently my feature on tiger sharks, see cover below, called Confessions of a shark virgin. I have to admit that I haven't read the small print attached to this honour, but it probably means I have to buy the drinks at the next DIVE party!
July 2006 - Scuba Diving Magazine USA
I dont normally report on editorial image usage in News, but I am very pleased to have had my first editorial pictures in Scuba Diving Magazine in the States. I have previously had advertising images in both of the big US dive magazines (my images used by the Cayman Islands Dept of Tourism are in as double page spreads regularly) but this is the first time I have images selected by the editorial staff. Very few British or European underwater photographers have their work used by the American magazines, as so many of the world's top underwater photographers are Americans. I have two full page images in the current issue and more images coming up in future issues.
July 2006 - Cover: DIVE Magazine
DIVE Magazine this month has published my feature about diving with tiger, great hammerhead and bull sharks while in the Bahamas on the Wetpixel Shark Trip with Jim Abernethy's Scuba Adventures. Because DIVE magazine has some of the world's most experienced shark photographers among its regular contributors (Douglas Seifert, Jeremy Stafford-Dietsch and Charles Hood, to name three) I felt like a bit of an imposter doing a shark article. So I decided to write the article from the perspective of a big shark virgin, as I had never seen any of these species before. You can read it in the July issue of DIVE.
July 2006 - Cover: Sport Diver Magazine
I currently don't write for the UK's Sport Diver magazine, but I do have one of my photos on the cover again this month. This is my second Sport Diver cover in just a couple of months, to go with the one I had in May. This image was taken in January in Grand Cayman. I am pleased to have the cover shots on two out of the three UK dive magazines this month!
July 2006 - Portfolio in DYK Magazine
The Scandinavian diving magazine DYK has published a 4 page portfolio of my pictures this month. I decided to select only natural history images, to show a different side to my photography compared with the more scuba-diving orientated images in The Art Of Diving. Furthermore 4 out of the 7 images featured were shot in 2006. I always enjoy seeing articles about me that I can't understand a work of! Dyk is published in both Danish and Swedish, and I am equally inept at both. Thankfully images do not any translation.
July 2006 - 1 Year of Magic Gallery
On 16th August 2005 Peter Rowlands and I started selling our Magic Filter for available light underwater photography. I actually invented the filter on our June Red Sea trip last year, so to celebrate 1 year of shooting the Magic underwater I have updated my DLSR Magic gallery to include my 25 favourite Magic images (that I have taken) from its first year of use. You can see my Magic Gallery here. Once the filter is officially one year old, I intend to do a much bigger version of this gallery, incorporating images from Magic users, on the Magic Filters website. The next 12 months promise to be exciting ones for UW filter photography as we have two new filters to introduce to our range.
July 2006 - Featured in Digital Camera Buyer
The British digital camera consumer magazine Digital Camera Buyer are running a feature on underwater cameras and photography this month. The article includes a four page interview with me, showing several of my photographs and revealing some tips for getting nice underwater pictures. Digital cameras and the proliferation of cost effective housings for them have made underwater photography incredibly accessible these days. A few years ago underwater photography articles in general camera magazines were always novelty pieces, these days they are very much the mainstream. It is certainly an exciting time to be an underwater photographer.
July 2006 - Wildlife expert
I am featured as an Out and About expert in this month's BBC Wildlife Magazine, talking about going snorkelling at Kimmerage Bay in Dorset. The item itself is very short, but it is worth checking out for the rather amusing mugshot of me that I chose to send in to accompany it. It is a self portrait taken with a fisheye lens of me actually in the water at Kimmerage! If you are interested in seeing what the underwater world is like when snorkelling in Dorset check out my winning portfolio in the BSoUP Best Of British competition click here.
June 2006 - Red Sea Workshop
Just back from the Red Sea. I have been to the Red Sea at exactly this time every year since 1998, and I love it. It was an awesome trip where everything went so much to plan that I can just change my post here on what I was going to do, to what I did do. I got lots of material for Ultimate Sports new book Dive Red Sea by Simon Rogerson and John McIntyre, and everyone seems happy with the options for the cover. I also shot plenty of material for the Top Spots Weltweit feature for Tauchen Magazine on shark reef. Then on the second week I ran the UWP Magazine Digital Techniques Workshop, which was very enjoyable and productive for all (the picture shows the gang). And finally Peter Rowlands and I put our finishing touches on our new AUTO-Magic filter, a new recipe I have devised to work with auto-white balance on compact cameras. We will be launching this in a month or so, when I'll tell more.
June 2006 - DYK Magazine Interview
The Scandinavian diving magazine DYK features an interview with me about The Art Of Diving and also my approach to underwater photography. I did the interview with writer Fredrik Isakson at the London Dive Show back in April. DYK is published in both Danish and Swedish versions and you can download the Swedish (I think) version of the interview here. I have also contributed a portfolio feature to the Magazine, which will be appearing in their August Issue.
June 2006 - Interview with NWP Photography
The Nature, Wildlife and Pet Photography Forum has just published a three part interview with me on all aspects of my photography. The first part has background on me, my approach to photography and the influences on my work. The second part focuses on my editorial publications, my new book The Art Of Diving and the Magic Filter. And the final section deals with environmental issues. I am the second underwater photographer to be interviewed by the site, after Eric Cheng was featured last year. Other nature and wildlife photographers featured in the series include Thom Hogan, Bjorn Rorslett, Ron Reznick and Michael Reichmann. You can read my interview here.
June 2006 - Sipadan Barge Accident
During my trip to Sipadan I photographed some damaged caused to the island's reefs by a barge running aground. The damage only effects a small area 370 square metres and the quality of diving in Sipadan remains excellent. Look at my Sabah 2006 gallery to see how great the diving is. Anyway after originally publishing my pictures of the incident on the websites of FiNS and DIVE magazines, the story has been reproduced widely, sometimes with several of the facts exaggerated. I have not wanted to make any money from these pictures and have allowed anyone who asked to reproduce them for free - I took them to show the damage and hopefully to stop further development on the island. That said not everyone asked! Anyway my images have accompanied reports on the incident in many news publications and websites including: FiNS, DIVE, Divester, Underwater Times, Daily Express (Malaysia), CDNN, Asia Dive News, Today (Singapore) and Mingguan (Malaysia).
May 2006 - An evening with Me!
Obviously I have suffer my own company every day, but on Tuesday 30th May in London, Ocean Optics and Mavericks Diving are presenting An Evening with Alex Mustard as part of their Great Diving Adventure series. There is a chance for banter beforehand, followed by a talk at Kings College. The event is free, but you must contact Ocean Optics to reserve a place. My presentation will be quite varied, but will cover plenty of stats on coral reef ecology and underwater photography. You can download a PDF with further details (and quite an old picture of me) here.
May 2006 - Online Articles
Just a quick announcement about a new feature on this website. For a long time I have published lists of the all the photography and marine biological articles I have written. These lists are useful for me to remind me what I have been doing, but I always thought that they were a bit dry! I would love to reproduce all these articles here on amustard.com, but that would take me weeks to do. But instead I have chosen a selection of about 20 of my favourites, both long and short, about marine life and photography and put them online as webpages. When possible I have tried to include images of the original magazine layouts of the articles as illustrations. You can find a listing of my online library here.
May 2006 - Sabah Trip for FiNS
I have just returned from an excellent trip to east Sabah, diving Sipadan, Mabul and Kapalai for FiNS magazine. I was hosted by three different resorts: starting off at Seaventures Dive Resort, then going on to the island of Mabul, staying with Borneo Divers, and then finally moving across to Sipadan Kapalai Dive Resort. You can read my FINS blog-diary about the trip here. The diving throughout the trip was superb, but unfortunately on my last day I witnessed a tragic accident as a construction barge smashed into the reef at Sipadan. Although very sad, this accident has not ruined the diving on the island but should serve as a horrible reminder of how easily precious natural wonders, such as Sipadan, can be damaged by our actions. To remind you of the wonders still thriving on Sipadan I have put up a gallery of my images from the trip here.
May 2006 - DIVE feature on cleaning
Just a short news item to remind you to look out for my new article on cleaning symbiosis in the ocean in the latest issue (June 2006) of DIVE Magazine. For this article I wanted to use both my own and other peoples images to illustrate this characteristically marine behaviour. After The Art Of Diving, where I just did the images, I wanted to remind people that I write as well. I hope that you enjoy the article.
May 2006 - Easyjet Interview
For those of you flying on easyJet this month be sure to check out the 5 page illustrated interview with me on pages 58-62 of the easyJet In-Flight magazine. For those not flying this month you can read the article online here. The article is called Water World, as you can see from the image of the opening spread above. For you non-Europeans, easyJet is a large airline and has more than 100 planes and last year flew 30 million people. The interview, conducted by Piers Townley, discusses the photography for The Art Of Diving and tips on diving and underwater photography in general. Hopefully this article will enthuse many people about the underwater world and introduce them to the best book about scuba diving for the last 50 years!
May 2006 - Cover: Sport Diver Magazine
This month I got my first cover on the PADI diving society magazine Sport Diver, here in the UK. The image they chose was taken last June in the Red Sea and features my dive buddy Denis Antippa diving on the wreck of the Ulysses in Egypt. This is actually Denis third modelling cover from that trip as he has twice made covers before on DIVE and UWP magazine, with shots on the Giannis D. And also features on several pages of AoD, as well as in the spread from easyJet, above.
May 2006 - Band name song after my photo
An unusual and amusing bit of news. I recently received an email from a newly formed London band asking if they could use the name of one of my photographs as inspiration for a song. The band's founder had seen my award winning Shy Hamlet Romance on display at the Natural History Museum, London as part of the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. I thought that this was brilliant, and of course I said yes! The band are called Pocketbooks and you can check out their tunes here. Shy Hamlet Romance was runner up in the Animal Behaviour (all other animals) Category of the 2005 Wildlife Photographer competition.
April 2006 - Announcing Digital Madness
I am very excited to announce a very special underwater photography event Digital Madness, which being run in the Cayman Islands in September. SCUBA Diving Magazine (USA) is teaming up with the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism, Cayman Airways and Mares along with 4 of the top dive operators in the business to bring you this unique event. I am running the show down at Ocean Frontiers at the East End of the island - with lectures, pool sessions, special and secret photo dives and even a guest appearance by Stephen Frink. Check out my recent Cayman Gallery as well, of course, as my new book The Art Of Diving to see the photographic potential available in Grand Cayman. To book your place go to the Ocean Frontiers website or email Lesley at Ocean Frontiers direct or call toll free from the States on 1.800.348.6096 - Package price is US$1599. European based photographers, in particular, may be interested in extending your stay to take in the annual coral spawning to make the most of flying across the Atlantic. To get you in the mood for this very special event you can practice your skills in this special Cayman underwater photography game on the Scuba Diving website!
April 2006 - Signed copies
I finally have some copies of The Art Of Diving myself and I am happy to send these out to people who want dedicated or signed copies. I would like to mention that postage costs are quite high - as books are heavy - about £5 for UK and £6.50 for EU and quite a lot more for further afield. The best way to avoid paying these postage costs is by coming along to one of my talks (I am sorry that you will have to suffer hearing me speak!) and get a copy from me in person. You can see what talks I have coming up on my talks page. But I am very happy to send them out by post. I am very happy to write dedications in the books, even unusual ones (I've already had some strange ones). Please email me if you are interested in getting a copy and discuss payment options (PayPal is best). Also if you are planning to come to a talk and want to make sure I don't run out of copies please email me beforehand!
April 2006 - Amazon Top 500
I am very excited to report that my new book, The Art Of Diving, reached the dizzy heights of the top 500 selling books on Amazon.co.uk during last week. Although I don't have a great deal of experience in these matters, I am told that this is pretty remarkable for an underwater book, most of which usually sit somewhere between 10,000-30,000 on the sales rankings. As I write this now we have dipped to a still very respectable 1500, although of course(!) we are the number one title that comes up if you search for diving in the books section of Amazon. I am still waiting to get some copies of the book myself, but once I do I will be offering a limited number of signed copies for sale. Please email me if you are interested.
STOP PRESS! On Sunday 23rd April The Art Of Diving reached its highest point I have seen so far - number 242 best seller on Amazon.co.uk.
April 2006 - Tauchen Ultimativ
No. I haven't done another book already. The German language version of The Art Of Diving will be released on 16th April, with reductions for pre-orders. Continuing in German: Tauchen ultimativ - Eintauchen in eine neue Dimension. Mit Tauchen Ultimativ eroffnen zwei Top-Journalisten der Szene eine vollig neue Dimension des Tauchens. Der Meeresforscher und international preisgekršnte Fotograf Alex Mustard und sein renommierter TextKollege Nick Hannah haben ihr Konnen zu diesem Meisterwerk vereint. Mit unglaublichen, bisher nie gesehenen Fotos fangen sie die Seele des Tauchens ein und geben dem Lebensgefuhl Tauchen eine ganz neue Dimension - eben Tauchen ultimativ. Den Taucher erwarten in diesem Buch gruBende Schildkroten, balzende Flundern, lauernde Haie und springende, gleitende und meditierende Taucher, so der renommierte Fotograf David Doubilet beim Erscheinen. Man darf also durchaus gespannt sein! Jeder, der bis zum 16.April 06 vorbestellt, erhalt das Buch zu einem ermaBigten Preis von nur 26,50 Euro, ab dem 16.04. kostet das schone Teil bereits 29,90 Euro im regularen Buchhandel. Alle Schnappchenjager wenden sich direkt per Telefon oder Email an Ultimate Sports: Tel. +49/(0)221/34803833 oder Email
klaren@brunomedia.de.
April 2006 - London Dive Show
The Art Of Diving got its official British public launch at the London International Dive Show (LIDS) during the weekend of 1st and 2nd April. Both myself and Nick attended the show, giving an illustrated talk about the book on both days and signing copies of the book on the Ultimate Sports Stand and also on the Aquapress Stand. It was a rare occasion that Nick and I were both in the same place and that place was England, and it gave lucky show-goers the chance to get rare dual signed copies. Thanks to TheDeepStop.com for the photo of Nick and I at the show (right) - looking pretty tired on Sunday afternoon. I have decided that signing books is rather like getting lines at school! Seriously though, I really enjoyed the event and it reminded me how rarely I get to see people's reactions to my images - it was incredibly satisfying seeing someone open the book and their face light up when they see my images. Nick and I also did several interviews during the event including for Dyk Magazine and TheDeepStop.com.
April 2006 - The Underwater Photographer
British underwater photographer Martin Edge has just released the third edition of his popular book The Underwater Photographer, published by Focal Press. This book is a major update on the previous editions and totally embraces digital photography and techniques. My modest contribution is a chapter on filters, that I wrote about a year ago, typically, just a couple of months before I invented the Magic Filter, which obviously would have featured prominently! The book is excellent. Very thorough, but also accessible and filled with real world advice and personal tips. You can read a review I have written on the book here on Wetpixel.
April 2006 - Portfolio in Newton Magazine
I am very flattered to say that the well known, Italian popular science magazine Newton has chosen to run a very large feature on me and my underwater photography in their April Issue. The article, which is 18 pages long, focuses on my fish photography and discusses how I try and communicate my passion for the oceans through my images. The portfolio features some new images (taken since The Art Of Diving), including a new stingray image, which is also used (small) on the cover of the Magazine. The portfolio also features a few older images of mine for a real cross section of my photography. For those who speak Italian, unlike me, this is how the article is introduced il risveglio di una tartaruga, la grinta dei pesci pipistrello, il muso di una bavosa: un inglese, biologo e appassionato di fotografia, a tu per tu con i nostri antenati. I hope it is nice! I like being called appassionato by Italians! Newton Magazine is also syndicated in Spain, Japan and China.
March 2006 - Wetpixel Shark Trip
March has been a very exciting month for me as I was able to get myself in front of some very impressive creatures on the Wetpixel Shark Trip to the Bahamas, with JASA: Jim Abernethy's Scuba Adventures. This was a wonderful trip and gave me lots of photography time with tiger sharks, great hammerheads, bull sharks, and lemon sharks (in addition to more common species such as nurse sharks, Caribbean reef sharks and blacktip sharks). It was also a great chance to spend time diving with my friends from Wetpixel and to hear all the gossip from the world of underwater photography. I would also like to thank Jim and his great crew on the Shear Water for making it such a unique and amazing experience. You can see a gallery of my images from the trip here.
March 2006 - Art Of Diving Coverage
The Art Of Diving officially went on sale while I was away in the Bahamas, and I am pleased to able to report that the UK's scuba diving magazines have been very excited by the book and both DIVE and Diver ran large features showcasing some of the material from the it in their April issues. PADI International also ran an announcement on the release of the book in their official news. I am really looking forward to the London International Dive Show at the beginning of April where I will be doing book signings with Nick (Hanna) and getting the chance to see some the diving public's reaction to the book. I am pleased to say that the book is generating lots of interest.
March 2006 - BSOUP Theme Portfolio
I am pleased to report that I retained the BSoUP Theme Portfolio trophy in March, and actually got the news while I was away in the Bahamas (and in fact I emailed in my entry from Florida). BSoUP is certainly going through something of a renaissance at the moment, with many members starring in international competitions. This means that even though they do not bring big prizes the club competitions do have a very high standard, and I am very proud of my competition successes at BSoUP. In fact as members we usually see many international prize winners, first at a club level. Coincidentally this competition was sponsored by Ultimate Sports Publications, although there was no bias in the judging because the results are decided by the members of the British Society of Underwater Photographers! You can see the results from the competition here.
March 2006 - The Art Of Diving - published
I am very happy to announce that my first photographic book The Art Of Diving was released in the UK at the start of March 2006. The book, published by Ultimate Sports Publications, is a collaboration with well known diving and travel author Nick Hanna. The book sets out to capture the spirit of scuba diving and to take the experience of being underwater to new imaginative levels. The book combines a wealth of beautiful and remarkable underwater photography, together with captivating explanations of the lure of the oceans. Together they reveal exactly what Jacques Cousteau meant when he claimed that Ôunderwater, man becomes an archangel. I am very proud of The Art Of Diving and the collaboration with Nick. You can read more about the book at artofdiving.com and can order a copy direct from Amazon UK.
March 2006 - That bloody snapper
I have to say I have had my fill with my snapper photo; it really has been everywhere in the last 6 months since winning the Animal Portraits category at the Wildlife Photographer of the year. As well as being published in many newspapers and magazines and reproduced on news websites around the world it is also a star attraction in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. Last weekend I went back to The Natural History Museum for the first time since the award ceremony, and it is amazing to think how many people must have seen it there on display. In addition the snapper is also part of the touring exhibition that visits museums both in the UK and all around the world. I have had several emails from friends who have seen it on display in Sydney, which I think is very unfair since I haven't yet had the chance to visit Australia!
March 2006 - Magic Success
I am very proud to announce that American photographer Rand McMeins won Best In Show and the David Doubilet Award for Excellence in Underwater Photography in the Beneath The Sea underwater photography competition. The reason I am so chuffed with this is that Rand used my Magic Filter to take his winning picture. OK, I can't take much credit as clearly his skill was entirely responsible for the winning shot, but it does make the point that in the right hands the Magic filter can produce really outstanding images, than win praise at the highest level in competitions. Buoyed by this success, Peter and I have decided to make the Magic filter available to photographers with compact cameras, but note these cameras must be capable of manual WB to work with the filter.
February 2006 - Art Of Diving website
The UK release of my first book The Art Of Diving is imminent and in preparation the website: artofdiving.com was launched on 24th February (actually this is still having bugs fixed so I have removed the link for now). The website is divided into two sections - the first is publicly accessible and gives you an idea of what the book is about and shows some sample pages. The main part of the website is password protected and contains a great deal of material designed to extend your enjoyment of the book. There are extended captions for all the images in the book, behind the scenes photos of the making of the book, free downloadable screensavers, articles and even galleries from guest photographers. The password for the extended section of the website is printed inside the book!
February 2006 - FINS Articles
The latest issue of FINS diving magazine dropped through my letterbox recently and everywhere I turned I kept bumping into my pictures. I had my regular Talking Megapixels column, this month discussing the difficult of trying to decide when to buy your first digital camera or when to upgrade. The article was cheekly titled Measurebating can make you blind! I also had a travel feature on exploring Bali called Bali road trip as well as news articles about the Magic Filters and my competition successes in the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year and the Antibes Festival. I am pleased to say that three of the articles are illustrated by images taken with the Magic Filters and no strobes, proving the technique can deliver images that are highly desired by publications because of their naturalistic look.
February 2006 - Gone to the dogs
As an underwater photographer I have photographed some fairly strange stuff, but nothing quite prepared me for shooting dogs in a canine hydrotherapy pool. This was a shoot for Petpatter magazine and I have to admit it was fantastic fun. Apparently, hydrotherapy is really useful for dogs with back problems or other physical injuries as it allows them to rebuild their muscles without the physical impact of exercise on land. This would have been a perfect assignment for my own dog, Goldfinger, if he was still with us as his love of the water was even greater than mine! But at least I got to shoot a golden retriever - so thanks Millie and all the staff at the Canine Care Centre. It was certainly a very different Friday afternoon to my usual ones.
February 2006 - Magic filters sold in 50 Countries
Magic Filters started off as a personal project when I set out to develop a filter for myself to use for available light photography. The few friends saw the early results and persuaded me, with the help of Peter Rowlands to make the filter available to all. So we started selling them for the grand price of £19. And I am now proud to say that six months on my filter is being used by photographers all around the world, and we have now sold it in 50 countries (although I should add that most countries are just represented by a single photographer). So if you are a digital underwater photographer and you haven't yet tried the Magic, check out www.magic-filters.com to see what you are missing!
January 2006 - Rob Galbraith Interview
I feel honoured, and very unworthy to be featured in an interview on Rob Galbraith.com, possibly the web's best known site for professional digital photographers, receiving more than 10 million unique visitors each month. The site features a three page interview, written by Eamon Hickey, about my photography and specifically using the Nikon D2X digital camera underwater. The interview also focuses on the new techniques that digital cameras have made possible for underwater photographers - including the Magic Filter. You can read the interview here.
January 2006 - Sub Aqva Cover
It is always nice when the first time a magazine uses my pictures they include a covershot. So I was very pleased to see supermodel Giles Shaxted once again strutting his stuff, this time in Italian. The magazine in question is Sub Aqva. This is actually the same image that is on the cover of The Art Of Diving, although on the book it is manipulated in the computer, to add a blur to make it a bit more graphic and more in the style of the book. This is the original shot - straight from the camera which was taken in Grand Cayman. It is featured in the magazine as an award-winner from the prestigious Antibes World Festival of Underwater Images, France.
January 2006 - UK Underwater Pictures
I don't dive in the UK, but on my return from Cayman I was pleased to see a rare spread of my UK underwater pictures in Sport DIVER Magazine. These pictures were taken in August and always remind me of the Ashes Cricket series - as I remember calling a holt to the shoot so I could get back to hear the latest score! The pictures feature my friends Anna Hickman and Jo Hopkins, who were taking a break from their Oceanographic PhDs to do a bit of underwater modelling. The images were taken snorkelling in Dorset (England) and you can see a gallery here.
January 2006 - Grand Cayman Shoot
As a underwater photographer it is great to start the year underwater and taking photos, which is exactly what I was doing in Grand Cayman for the first two weeks of January. I was very excited about this trip because so many of my Cayman images had been used in the Art Of Diving, many familiar subjects were once again fresh to me. The aim of this trip, diving with Ocean Frontiers and Dive Tech was to shoot new stock for a forthcoming regional diving guide and also for major library submissions. I am also very grateful to my friend and fellow underwater photographer Veruschka Matchett, who came along to model and to shoot with me. I am very pleased with the haul of images from this trip, which mix up my own creative desires with the more conservative style required for the guide book and library. You can see a gallery here.
January 2006 - Talking Megapixels Online!
My Talking Megapixels Column, which I started writing for SE Asian Scuba magazine Fins, is now being syndicated online on the well known digital photography website Wetpixel. I am very please about this because it means my words of wisdom will now read by a wider audience! In fact the column contains very few words of wisdom and rather than being a statement of fact it is intentionally opinionated, hoping to generate debate on key issues in digital underwater photography. You can check it out here.
January 2006 - Why I have been so quiet!
A few friends have asked me why there hasn't been much news here on amustard.com recently. The answer is The Art Of Diving - my first book - a collaboration with author Nick Hanna, published by Ultimate Sports Publications. The book is (finally) done and is currently in press for a scheduled release at the end of February or the start of March. It is not just a collection of photos, but a exploration of why humans love diving. Obviously only a handful of people have seen it so far, but the reaction has been very encouraging. To give you a flavour, we approached one of my heroes, National Geographic underwater photographer, David Doubilet for a cover quote. He commented "Come, dive into Nick Hanna and Alexander Mustard s bright blue world. This is the best book about diving since Jacques Cousteau s The Silent World. Here turtles bow, flounders court, sharks skulk and, best of all, divers leap, soar and even meditate. Alex has a unique eye. This is dynamic underwater imagery at its best." Once the book is out, I doubt I will talk of much else. So you won't miss it. The whole experience has been very exciting.
December 2005 - End of year review
2005 has been a fantastic year. Here are a few of the highlights to save you scrolling down! The arrival of my Nikon D2X in February prompted a glut of photography with trips to Egypt (2), Maldives, Cayman (3) and Bali. Much of this photography was for my new book The Art Of Diving, which is now fully laid out and designed and scheduled for printing and publication in the new year. This year I have written more than 20 UW photography articles, including having my own column "Talking Megapixels" in the magazine Fins, and had 19 marine life articles published, including peer reviewed marine science papers in the journals Nature and Limnology & Oceanography: Methods. On the competition front I won awards for my photography at both the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year and the Antibes Festival, and completed a grand-slam at BSOUP, winning all three portfolio competitions in the last 12 months. Also this year I have led trips to Bali to see the incredible biological diversity and to Cayman to watch mass coral spawning, and have taught underwater photography at the Digital Jam event, where my group won 6 of the 7 categories. I have continued in my role as co-administrator on Wetpixel and digital officer of BSOUP. I have also had some fairly strange things in front of my camera this year: from world-record free divers to dogs having hydrotherapy treatment, and I even picked up a cinematographer credit on a movie! Finally I am very proud of the Magic filter, that I developed in June and is now being used by underwater photographers around the world to create images that were never possible before.
December 2005 - DIVE Magazine Cover
I had never had a cover on DIVE magazine before 2005 and now I have three - meaning a quarter of the covers this year have been mine! However I am particularly pleased that this image was chosen for the cover as it shot taken with my Magic Filter and therefore doubles as a great advert. The issue features a short article by me on diving the Giannis D Wreck, wow my first wreck diving article, and also a thorough review of the Magic Filter, by DIVE's senior correspondent, and top underwater photographer Charles Hood. The Magic scored 9/10 for performance and 10/10 for value, with a verdict of Excellent way to restore natural colours. That is magic news!
December 2005 - Beneath the Seven Seas
I got a pleasant surprised this week when the new maritime archaeology book Beneath The Seven Seas edited by George F Bass dropped through my letterbox. I got sent a copy of this book because features a few of photographs that I took for the National Museum of the Cayman Islands. The book is a collection of stories about some of the greatest shipwreck archaeology projects ever undertaken from all around the world. It is a fantastic book with first hand accounts from the archaeologists who uncovered the stories and artifacts of these fascinating wrecks.
November 2005 - DIVE Magazine Big Shot
As a result of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, my pictures from that competition are all over the place in magazines this month. Both DIVE and Diver in the UK ran the story, and I was particularly pleased that my image also got full page spreads in the prestigious Unterwasser Magazine in Germany and in Professional Photographer Magazine in the UK. Anyway this item is about the Big Shot feature in DIVE that showcases one of my newer images, taken on my recent trip to Bali. It is nice to remind people that I photograph more than snappers!
November 2005 - Antibes Festival Success
The Festival Mondial De L' Image Sous-Marine, otherwise known as the Antibes Festival is widely acknowledged as the Oscars of underwater photography. This year the Festival attracted entries from professional underwater photographers and filmmakers from 50 countries. I am pleased to report that I was awarded the Plongeur De Bronze for my 10 slide portfolio. That is my fifth award from the Festival since 2002. As well as being a competition the Festival is also a fantastic social event and I met many great and interesting people there.
October 2005 - BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year
I am absolutely delighted to be able to announce that I was both a category winner and runner up in the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2005. I had not entered the competition since I started shooting digital in 2002 so I am very happy with these awards. My Snappers School won the very popular Animal Portraits category and my Shy Hamlets Romance was runner up in the awkwardly named Animal Behaviour (all other animals) category. The snapper picture is absolutely everywhere at the moment as this image was chosen for most of the press materials, plus it has been all over the world in newspapers and on the web. Both of my images are in the special winners supplement to BBC Wildlife Magazine and of course in the WPOTY Portfolio 15 Book. I have wanted to be a winner in this competition for many years, and I am very pleased with this award.
October 2005 - BSoUP Portfolio Grand Slam
Until December last year I had never won a BSoUP Portfolio competition, which was frustrating as they are always regarded as the Society's most prestigious competitions. Well, now I am pleased to say that I currently hold all the three portfolio trophies (I am eligible for, not being allowed to enter the Beginners Portfolio!): the Open Portfolio, Theme Portfolio and most recently the Best of British Portfolio (which I won jointly with Sam Bean). I was surprised and pleased to win the Best of British award as I do not dive in the UK and had taken all of the images while snorkelling. You can see a larger version of the portfolio here. All these images were taken with my Nikon D2X in Dorset during August and feature my friends Anna and Jo.
October 2005 - Nature Publication
I don't normally use my news page to report scientific publications - as they are rarely exciting! But I am very pleased to be able to say that our work on the function of open ocean ecosystems has been published as a paper in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. Oceanography is a team sport and I am particularly pleased for all the gang from the FISHES cruise that our work has been published in such an important place. On my page about the FISHES Cruise you can see three jars of my plankton samples - including a very green middle jar that is filled with the mining diatoms from the Iceland Faroes Front. Nature has an impact factor (for 2004) of 32.182, making it the world's top multidisciplinary science journal, and the world's top journal publishing basic scientific research, which is why I am pleased.
October 2005 - Pictures, Pictures Everywhere
Pushing open my front door after time in the ocean I am usually greeted by a mountain of bills and if I am lucky copies of the recent magazines that I have featured my images. This time I was met by the October Issues of DIVE and BBC Wildlife Magazine that both run my coral reef images, and the September issue of Tauchen that has a wreck picture. I also actually appear as a model in DIVE too - in Peter Rowlands photography article (twice in one picture in fact!). While I was away I also had my first chance to see my Cayman Island's advert that has been running in the US diving magazines Scuba Diving and Sport Diver for most of this year. This shot features my friend Giles diving with the silversides, and was taken last summer.
September 2005 - Cayman Coral Spawning
Once again September meant zapping across the Atlantic to Grand Cayman to study the annual coral spawning. It was great to see such an extensive spawn, just one year after Hurricane Ivan, especially considering that our study site was probably the most exposed dive site to the storm. The number of species spawning was reduced from previous years (probably as a result of energy going into repair and growth following the Category 5 Ivan), but with the most abundant species all spawning the size of the spawn was certainly as large as it has ever been. We also saw Flower Coral participating in the spawn for the first time this year. Another first was that my coral spawning orientation lectures were used at the core teaching for a new PADI specialty qualification designed by Instructor Steve Schultz, and 20 divers were certified with this new qualification. Finally the story of the spawning has really hit the headlines this year, not only was it featured in the local press (Cayman Compass and Cayman Net News) it is also currently doing the round in the diving world, such as in the US Magazines Scuba Diving and Sport Diver.
September 2005 - Movie Star!
Just a fun bit of news, really, but I am officially part of the movie industry! In recognition of my crucial work on the forthcoming freediving film The Greater Meaning Of Water I am now officially listed on the International Movie Data Base. OK, I am just the smallest of the small fry at the moment, but maybe one day I will have an entry as long as Big Jack's! Right?
September 2005 - Secrets of Bali
I am just back from a successful Divequest group trip to Bali. It was a very lucky trip and we saw almost all the creatures we set out to find - loads of Seahorses, Ghost Pipefish, Nudibranchs and Frogfish, two species of Pygmy Seahorses, two Mimic Octopus out at the same time, Wobbegong sharks, Harelquin Shrimps, Boxer Crabs, Ambon Scorpionfish etc etc. If it was weird we saw it! The only thing that proved elusive was the Mola mola, which try as we might just wasn't to be seen on the day we went looking. Bali is a fantastic island, with first rate hotels and the diving is so much better than people think - this small group trip is running again next year, so contact Divequest for more details. Check out the Bali Gallery website to see my pictures from the trip!
August 2005 - Red Sea Digital Workshop!
I am very pleased to announce, in collaboration with Tony Backhurst Scuba and Underwater Photography Magazine, my Digital Techniques Workshop, that will take place next summer around the fascinating wrecks and vibrant reefs of the Red Sea (25th June to 2nd July)! This trip costs £975, and is taking place on probably the finest new liveaboard in the Red Sea MV Typhoon. The aim of this workshop is simply to help digital photographers get the great shots they want. Places on this trip will be allocated on a first come first served basis, please send me a short email to register your interest (this is non-committing at this stage). I am away during most of September, but you can read more here.
August 2005 - Magic Filters AVAILABLE!
My June trip to the Red Sea was a nice break from deliverable photography and it allowed me to experiment with a variety of new techniques. Perhaps the most successful was the new underwater filter I designed and refined for colour photography in available light. This Magic Filter was so successful that we are putting them into production! The filter allows a digital photographer to photograph in full colour without artificial light from the surface down to 15m. The filter differs from others because it is not designed to perfectly counteract the filtering effect of seawater because this is highly variable. Instead it adjusts colours to produce a colour balance that is easily corrected by the cameraÕs white balance. This is a new approach for underwater filtration, one that takes full advantage of the new technology of digital cameras, and gives the filter its wide working depth range making it a practical solution for underwater photography in the real world. Check out the Magic Filters website and buy yours today!
August 2005 - Portfolio in X-Ray Magazine
I am pleased to be able to share that a portfolio of my underwater images was featured in the August/September issue of X-Ray Magazine. I regularly get requests for portfolio features like this and I always try and show different selections of my work. In this case we concentrated on marine life and behavioural shots, particularly on reefs. Some of these images are quite old, indeed 7 of them were taken on film, but this is the first time that several of them have been seen anywhere other than my website. You can see the PDF of my portfolio here.
July 2005 - New Gallery on this website
It has been on my to do list for ever! But finally I have put a new gallery in the photography section of this website, that contains 50 of my new images taken since I last updated the original galleries in early 2004. OK it is not in the same built in format as the old galleries, but at least there is some of my more recent photography on this site at last. I have tried to show the variety of my photography with this new gallery, while at the same time choosing images that I think represent my style of shooting. There are lots of black and whites, behaviour shots, and clean, crisp fish portraits as well as wrecks and a good number of people images, that I guess reflects the photography I have been doing for The Art Of Diving. The majority of these new images have been taken this year using my Nikon D2X camera. Click here for a shortcut to the gallery.
July 2005 - UWP Magazine Covershot
I was very proud that my image was chosen as the covershot for the 25th special anniversary issue of Underwater Photography Magazine (or UWP to its friends). And to add icing to the cake the picture was taken with a Magic Filter! It was very much out of the blue when I asked to contribute to the first issue and I have continued submitting ever since - and luckily Peter Rowlands, the editor, has kept publishing them. I have written articles reviewing kit (housings, cameras, lenses, strobe, filters and even software) but I prefer to write about the techniques of underwater photography. I often find writing about a technique is often the best way to focus my thoughts on the subject and usually acts to improve my photography too. UWP is a fantastic and free publication for all underwater photography enthusiasts and long may it continue!
July 2005 - FREE Digital Workshop in London
Just a quick announcement. On Saturday 9th July I am running a FREE digital photography day at Ocean Optics in London 1 to 1 with Alex Mustard. Starting at noon I will be on hand to discuss and offer one to one advice on how to improve your underwater images. Then as a special evening event I will make a presentation to reveal the intricacies of the techniques that he uses to produce top underwater digital photographs. I am pleased to say that this is a free event, but with limited space, the talk is by ticket only - contact Ocean Optics to reserve yours. To quote from the Optics website "This is a wonderful and rare opportunity to learn simple skills that will greatly help you to make better underwater photographs, regardless of the digital camera that you own".
June 2005 - Egyptian Experiments
Late June took me, as usual, to the Red Sea with friends from the British Society of Underwater Photographers for a week of liveaboard diving. After a number of trips tied to specific deliverables, this trip provided me with the opportunity to experiment with new photographic techniques and test new ideas. All the tests went really well - especially my new Magic colour filter, that produced stunning coloured results, without flash, from the surface to 15m. The trip was also a recce trip for the Advanced Digital Workshop that I indent to run in the Red Sea next summer, with backing from Underwater Photography Magazine. You can read more about the trip here, and see a gallery of pictures here.
June 2005 - X-Ray Magazine Cover Shot
I am always happy when my first contribution to a magazine includes a covershot. X-Ray Magazine is a bimonthly dive magazine published in PDF format and distributed worldwide over the internet. The magazine featured the Cayman Islands in this issue and editor Peter Symes asked me to contribute, as he wanted my stingrays on the cover! The magazine covers many of the top stories from the Islands including Bloody Bay Wall, Stingray City, Freediving World Records, Coral Spawning and an interview with Cathy Church. I am pleased that my image was chosen for the cover as I think the serenity of black and white is a fitting tribute to the popular co-editor John Neuschwander, who died last month.
June 2005 - The Greater Meaning of Water
My good friends all know that I am rather keen on my movies! So I am very proud to announce that I am now finally part of the US Motion Picture Industry. OK admittedly I am not staring in Revenge of the Sith, but I am credited as the underwater production photographer for a new short film on freediving called The Greater Meaning Of Water. The film, written and directed by Sky Christopherson, stars Justin Williford as the freediver Max Avery. The image on the left shows underwater cameraman, Chris Branston during the shoot with Justin. To some extent freediving is just the back drop for the film, which is more an exploration of the higher state of mind that some elite athletes experience during competition, known to sports psychologists as the flow state. I am really looking forward to seeing the finished film.
June 2005 - More Coral Spawning
I have just confirmed that I am off to Grand Cayman at the end of September - and you can join me! This will be my third year of coral spawning diving in Grand Cayman as I slowly (once a year) add to the dataset I am collecting. Working with my friends Ocean Frontiers we have setup Eco-Week an ideal and original dive vacation for those with a passion to know more about the world underwater and to experience unusual photo opportunities. If you are interested please email me, or book direct with Ocean Frontiers. You can download my article on the excitement of coral spawn diving from XRay Magazine here (1.3MB).
May 2005 - Big boys in the Maldives
One of the main projects I have been shooting for in the last year is called the Art Of Diving. We have amassed most of the material for this project, but the obvious hole in the image set was big animals. With deadlines looming and a need for good encounters with remarkable creatures it was imperative to choose the correct location. So for the final shoot for this project I set out to one of the prime locations for the big stuff - a liveaboard around the atolls in the Maldives. I joined the lovely MV Sea Queen, run by Maldives Scuba Tours, and with the help of dive guides Nick and Demelza saw whale sharks, mantas, dolphins, false killer whales, pygmy killer whales and even Orcas. Plus the seething mass of reef fish that is everywhere in the Maldives. OK, you can never guarantee the big stuff - but in the Maldives it isn't far off. You can read more about the trip here (but i am afraid most of the images are under wraps for now).
May 2005 - DIVE Magazine Covershot
I waited ages for my first cover shot on DIVE magazine and then two come along in quick succession! I took this picture in the Lembeh Strait last year and immediately liked it because it offered an alternative view of a common subject. On my birthday I posted my 8 favourite images from the previous year on the Wetpixel website and this shot was one of them. But I found that not everyone got the shot, and certainly never thought it would be a cover. Luckily one person who did like it was DIVE publisher Graeme Gourlay who saw it during my presentation at the Outdoor Show in March and wanted to use it. There had to be a reason for the image so Graeme came up with Fighting Nemo idea for an article and asked me to write a short article on aggression in anemonefish based on a few comments I had made during my talk. Very much a case of the cart coming before the horse!
May 2005 - Talking Megapixels in Asia
I have started writing a new column on the wide world of digital underwater photography for the Singapore based diving magazine Fins. I have always wanted my own column - and I am sure to let the power go to my head! The column is called Talking Megapixels, an expression coined by a friend from BSoUP, Mike Maloney, to describe the techno-babble he heard me speaking to Peter Rowlands on one of our dive trips! I hope to use the column to discuss some of the difference that digital has made, from the way we shoot to the social changes it has ushered in! Wearing my other hat I am also a consultant on Marine Biology for the magazine.
April 2005 - Cayman Islands Advertising Campaign
April was also the first time that I saw one of my images as an advert for the Cayman Islands. Hopefully I will have several images coming out as part of this new dive tourism campaign, however I cannot tell you about them until they have appeared in print! And since the adverts are mainly appearing in North American publications I am not always that quick to know that they are out! This image was taken just a couple of days before Hurricane Ivan at the Babylon dive site on the North Wall. And I am pleased to say that I returned to this dive site in January and the sponge formation, like much of the diving on the island, was not affected by the storm.
April 2005 - Freediving World Record
OK it wasn't me (not a chance!), but I was there to photograph it! On 11th April Mandy-Rae Cruickshank broke the free immersion world record extending it to 74m (that's going down a rope into the ocean, without fins, to 74m and back - on a breath of air). I have to admit that I went to photograph the freediving as a bit of a skeptic, but came back a total convert. Wow. It is so awesome live. If you ever get the chance to watch freedivers disappearing into the blue - grab it with both hands! To find out more about the Cayman freediving event visit Performance Freediving. You can read more about my exploits taking photographs of the freedivers here.
April 2005 - BSoUP In Focus Cover Shot
The Spring 2005 issue of In Focus magazine, the newsletter of the British Society Of Underwater Photographers has one my photos on the cover. The image shows my buddy Giles Shaxted swimming through a school of silversides at Eden Rock in Grand Cayman. This picture was taken on the same dive as the Diver Cover shot (see below) when I was able to persuade Giles to pose for me as his own camera had run out of batteries! Giles is usually a willing model and has helped me create some of my favourite images from Cayman. I am also pleased because it is the first time one of my images has appeared on the cover of this long running publication.
April 2005 - D2X Underwater
I used all my connections in the photographic world to ensure that I was able to get my hands on the new 12.4 Megapixel Nikon D2X when a first few were available on the international release date (25th February). And rather uniquely I already had a Subal housing for it (which I had received specially sent from Subal in Austria to Ocean Optics in London the day before). Anyway just over a week later the three of us (me, the D2X and the Subal housing) were in the Red Sea getting acquainted. Being the first person to use this camera underwater I had a few teething problems to work through (like making sure that the housing didn't leak), but by the end of the first day I was in love! Wow, this really is an amazing camera. Click here to see a gallery of my D2X images, and here to read a mini-review of the camera and housing. So far I have also published reviews of this camera in Underwater Photography Magazine, Wetpixel and Scuba Diving Australasia.
March 2005 - BSoUP Theme Portfolio
I am very pleased to report that at the March meeting of the British Society of Underwater Photographers (BSoUP) I won the Theme Portfolio Award, sponsored by Ultimate Sports, to add to the Open Portfolio Competition I won back in December. I feel very proud to hold both awards simultaneously. My portfolio, Rush Hour At Stingray City, was a collection of 6 images of stingrays, inspired by the photo Squadron, that is on my homepage. The other 5 images were all taken on the final dive of the Digital Jam event in Cayman in January, using a Nikon D70 camera that I borrowed from my friend, Steve Broadbelt. The portfolio is a combination of three colour and three black and white images. You can see the portfolio here.
March 2005 - Speaking at the Outdoors Show
On Sunday 20th March I am speaking at the UK Outdoors Show, sponsored by the Ordinance Survey, at the National Exhibition Centre. My talk is part of the Go-Diving section of the show and the subject is Dances With Fishes. My talk is about my approach to photographing marine wildlife (particularly fish) and how I try to take images that reveal the highly evolved and intimate behaviour of coral reef fish. My talk is scheduled for 12:30-13:30. Other speakers include John McIntyre, Tanya Streeter, Mike Valentine. To read more about the show click here.
February 2005 - DIVE Magazine Cover
The March Issue of DIVE magazine finally brought my first cover shot! Strangely the image ended up in DIVE's hands because they sponsor BSoUP's Open Portfolio competition. They wanted the images for their News section and while they were at the magazine they also decided to put one on the cover. Great. The shot shows a Bohar Snapper, with the rest of the school behind, and was taken last summer in the Red Sea, using the telephoto technique I have developed for digital underwater photography. The image was taken with a Nikon D100 with a 160mm equivalent focal length lens (on FF). I am pleased that an image that I like because of the innovative technique I used has also stood up as just an image - the magazine don't care about my telephoto technique! I am relieved to finally break my DIVE magazine cover duck!
February 2005 - Amateur Photographer Website of the Week
For once this website was the focus of attention when Amateur Photographer Magazine featured it and my photography as their Website of the Week. The publicity shifted my daily traffic up by 50% to 15000 hits per day (the site's maximum was after Hurricane Ivan in September when I got up to 350000 per day). I also received a lot of complimentary emails from AP's readers about my photography. This is what they said "Alexander Mustard is an award-winning underwater photographer, with a great website. It is difficult to pick out a favourite section in the Gallery as all the images are fantastic. However, some shots that stick in my mind include a diver blowing a seemingly huge bubble, Alex's brother in armbands (shortlisted in our APOY competition some years ago [actually it won]), a silvery blue shoal of fish rushing past and a squadron of three stingrays in b&w looking like spaceships in formation. Unmissable. Sarah Jackson."
February 2005 - Diver Magazine Cover
Sometimes it takes a while for news to filter through to me! Canadian Magazine Diver used one of my silversides shots from last summer on the cover of their December Issue. I only heard about it when they wanted to pay me! The original shot was a horizontal and they chose to crop it into a square to use on the cover. A lot of photographers moan when their images are not used exactly as they shot them. I always find it really interested to see how art editors choose to use my images for their needs. I can always show people the original afterwards. Diver Magazine is North America's longest running dive mag and it has a very impressive list of contributing editors and advisors. As I have said before, I am always pleased when the first time one of my images appears in a publication it is on the cover! Diver Magazine, Canada.
January 2005 - Digital Jam Grand Cayman
In January I had the chance to escape the UK winter and head to Grand Cayman to host the Dive Chronicles Digital Jam event at Ocean Frontiers! It was hard work, but great fun. I gave 4 hour long lectures outside on the pool deck, ran pool tune up session and was on hand to give one to one advice to all the participants. I was very pleased that at the end of the week my group won 6 of the 7 categories in this island wide event. Digital Jam was considered by all a resounding success and will happen again in January 2006. Make sure you book up early. Ingvar Eliasson has put a report on the week on Digideep. Read the Ocean Frontiers report on DigiJam. See the winning images in the flashy Dive Chronicles winners' gallery. You can read my own report on my first full on teaching week here.
January 2005 - Divequest trip to Bali
I'm now back from the Bali Recce trip (which was awesome) and Divequest are busy sorting out all the final details for next year's "Quest for diversity, in Bali" that I am leading. I am so pleased that this trip will be going to Bali. First of all the diving there is first rate and so varied. Awesome reef walls and scenery, the most astonishing fish covered wreck, muck sites, and reliable encounters with massive and rare pelagic species. I am so happy to be involved with a trip that I know will be a success basically because the quality of the diving is so high. Anyway, as a more complete write up of the Bali trip I have made this illustrated PDF of the recce trip - which also gives a good idea of what to expect on next year's (2005) group trip. You can download it here (6.5MB). PLEASE NOTE that the trip is now full, but I will be running more trips, and please contact Divequest for details.
December 2004 - BSoUP Open Portfolio
I am very pleased to say that I have won the British Society of Underwater Photographer's Open Portfolio competition, that is sponsored by DIVE Magazine. In my opinion (and that of many people) this is the most important annual competition in British UW Photography, and I am very proud to have joined all the big names of the previous winners on the trophy. You can see larger versions of the images and read more about them on the BSoUP Website.
November 2004 - Officially Weird
Much to the mass amusement of my friends I am featured in a new film called Ocean Weirdos. I would like to stress that I am not, in fact, one of the wierdos! Ocean Weirdos is a new underwater natural history film made by two of the UK's top UW filmmakers John Boyle and John McIntyre. The film features unusual marine creatures from both shallow water and the abyss. My role is to talk about these creatures and explain why such weirdness actually makes perfect sense once we consider how and where each animal lives. This is my first appearance in a wildlife documentary and as a result my ego has been massaged substantially, even if I do look a bit chubby on the screen!!
November 2004 - DPM Camouflage Book Launched
I was invited to Soho for the swanky launch party of the DPM (Disruptive Patterned Material). The press generated by the release of this book has got my images into many fashionable publications for the first time, such as FHM and Warp. The book really is a magnum opus on the subject of camouflage. It seems hard to imagine anything that has not been camouflaged that does not appear! I am actually really proud to be involved with this project and I launch party was pretty cool too!
Below are some quotes from the press releases which describe what it is all about. "Conceptualised by Maharishi, DPM (Disruptive Pattern Material) is a two volume 944-page encyclopaedic art book that takes the reader through the intriguing world of camouflage in which things are never quite the way they seem. DPM is beautifully illustrated with over 5,000 images, most of which are in full colour and many previously unpublished. DPM is an encyclopaedic art book that charts the history of camouflage from its roots in nature, through to its adoption by the military, and on to its current popularity and use within modern civilian culture. The Sub-Aqua chapter of the Nature section, for instance, includes stunning pictures of stealthy marine organisms by the award winning photographer Dr Alexander Mustard."
November 2004 - More Zen Diving Publications
The Zen Diving project is still going strong. Our latest publication is in South Africa's Divestyle Magazine. This is certainly one of the interesting spins offs of the Zen Diving project is that it enables me to get my images published in a number of publications that I had no contact with before. Nick Hanna and I have been working very hard on the Zen Concept recently and have evolved the theme for a more mainstream appeal. Watch this space (there is a clue in the title of this article!).
October 2004 - Divequest Brochure Cover Shot
The gallery of images in the annual brochure of UK travel agent Divequest is always one of the highlights of the underwater photography year in the UK as it features some of the best images from the UK's best underwater photographers. And for many years I got the brochure and aspired that my pictures would be part of it. Well, last year my pictures were part of the gallery and this year I have gone one better and got one of my images on the cover - a picture of a leaping pygmy seahorse taken in Lembeh in March. I must say it has printed very well!
November 2004 - Divequest '05 group trip to Bali
I'm now back from the Bali Recce trip (which was awesome) and Divequest are busy sorting out all the final details for next year's "Quest for diversity, in Bali" that I am leading. I am so pleased that this trip will be going to Bali. First of all the diving there is first rate and so varied. Awesome reef walls and scenery, the most astonishing fish covered wreck, muck sites, and reliable encounters with massive and rare pelagic species. I am so happy to be involved with a trip that I know will be a success basically because the quality of the diving is so high. Anyway, as a more complete write up of the Bali trip I have made this illustrated PDF of the recce trip - which also gives a good idea of what to expect on next year's (2005) group trip. You can download it here (6.5MB). This trip is now full, but I will be running more trips, so please contact Divequest for details.
November 2004 - January '05 Grand Cayman DigiJam
Calling all digital underwater photographers. Do you want to enjoy a week of photographic diving on Grand Cayman's reefs and wrecks? Have the chance to socialize with other photographers and pick up tips from on site photo-pros? Do you want the chance to win over $20,000 in prizes? Then this is what you have been waiting for! And you only have to wait until the last week of January for Grand Cayman's Digital Jam. I am running the Digijam week at Ocean Frontiers. Click here for more information.
October 2004 - Talk at Visions
For the forth year in a row I have given a talk at the annual Visions in the Sea underwater photography Conference in London. This year my talk was entitled 'Digital Thinking' and is about how to modify traditional photographic techniques when using a digital camera underwater. By thinking digitally photographers cannot only achieve results on digital than are as good as film - we can surpass them and take whole new kinds of pictures. This talk was pretty much a toure de force of my two years of shooting a digital SLR underwater. So I was very pleased how well received it was, and seemingly the whole audience commented on the originality of my ideas and quality of my images. More.
October 2004 - Bali a quest for diversity
As England started to get a bit chilly as Autumn closes in I was up and away to Bali, Indonesia for a whistle-stop tour of the island as a final recce for a Group Expedition I am leading there for Divequest next September. Bali offers such diverse diving - everything from encounters with giant ocean sunfish (Mola mola) to tiny macro life like pygmy seahorses and boxer crabs. This trip also let me catch up and dive with fellow Wetpixel member Robert Delfs. You can read more about the trip on my recent projects pages and see a temporary gallery of images from it here.
September 2004 - Golden Hour Feature in DIVE Magazine
I am pleased to report that the September issue of DIVE Magazine contains a large feature by me on Dusk Diving, containing pictures from my last two trips to the Red Sea and the Cayman Islands. I am very pleased with this feature as it has a number of my images of fish spawning that few other photographers have ever captured. The feature spans pages 32-38.
The same issue of DIVE also contains a Big Shot Special Feature that asks "ten of the world's leading underwater photographers about their decision to go digital". The article is kicked off by Douglas David Seifert, and gets comments from US photographers David Doubilet and Doug Perrine as well as UK snappers Georgette Douwma, Paul Kay, Mark Webster, Dan Burton, Charles Hood, Peter Rowlands and me. I feel in esteemed company!
August/September 2004 - A long stay on Grand Cayman
The summer of 2004 took me away from the UK for a long stay in Cayman that allowed me to get on with various projects out there. I spent a couple of weeks working indoors on the Snorkelling Book with Stephen Broadbelt, the first draft of which is mostly complete. Don't worry I did get outside regularly. An on-going project throughout was photographing silversides, small schooling fish that fill Grand Cayman's caves and caverns during the summer months. My good friend Giles Shaxted was my regular accomplice on these dives. Also Wetpixel administrator James Wiseman and his fiancŽe Sarah Bernhardt visited me for a long weekend, which was lots of fun and we did plenty of diving, concentrating photographically on supermacro subjects. I also had the chance to try out a Nikon D70 in a Subal housing and wrote a review of the system for Wetpixel as well as completing some high speed flash synch tests.
Finally, I was joined by a fantastic group of divers from UK travel agent Divequest to see the Annual Coral Spawning. We had a fantastic spawn this year with at least 10 species spawning, several I had never seen before. The visibility was some of the best I have ever seen on Cayman and we were treated to encounters with reef sharks, turtles, stingrays, tarpon, eaglerays as well as some of the smaller members of the reef. Unfortunately just as we finished a week of amazing diving we were caught up in Hurricane Ivan, that sent us scurrying for the local hurricane shelter and caused a large amount of damage to the island. Thankfully we are all completely fine and with the help of my local knowledge were amongst the first couple of hundred people off the island after the storm - by private jet, no less! You can read more about this trip here.
August 2004 - Oceans-Image Picture Library first sale
Oceans-Image is a new Online Picture library dedicated to stocking the best Underwater Images in the world. The library will be a major representative of my photographs when it is launched in October/November this year. Despite not being officially open for business, the library has already made its first sale of my images, that were used in The Times (London) at the end of July. As well as representing me, Oceans-Image also contains stock from Charles Hood, Julian Calverley, Donald Tipton, Douglas Seifert, Lawson Wood and more. Link.
August 2004 - DPM book printed
The DPM book is probably the coolest project I have been involved with. Keeping quiet about this one has been a real strain - at last I can blab a bit. Us marine-biologist/underwater photographer sorts rarely get the chance to mix in such fashionable circles! It is certainly the only time that my fish pictures have shared a page with pictures from Playboy! In the book my images rub shoulders with pictures of cultural icons such as Robert De Niro, U2, Dustin Hoffman, Janet Jackson & David Beckham, and alongside fashion photography showing camouflaged garments from the likes of Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, Moschino and Dolce & Gabbana. Other contributors include: Smithsonian Institution, Andy Warhol Foundation, The Face magazine, Carhartt, Adidas, Rankin, Tommy Boy Records & John Galliano. Cool! I am sure that I will post more details about this book over the coming months - when I have actually seen it! Visit the DPM website for more information - this book is scheduled for a September 2004 release.
August 2004 - Award at Celebrate The Sea Festival
Celebrate the Sea Marine Imagery Festival is the biggest event of its kind in the Asia Pacific. I was pleased to receive a High Commendation Award for my digital portfolio, and was the only British still-photographer to be amongst the awards. I hope one day to be able to attend this great festival in person. Link.
July 2004 - Interview in Sportsdykkeren
Danish diving magazine Sportsdykkeren has published a three page interview with me (in Danish) as part of feature called Digi Talt by Michael Jensen. I was pleased that I was asked to make this interview and I think it reflects my every growing profile as a digital underwater photographer. The downside is that I have absolutely no idea what I have said because I can't understand a word of it. The article is undoubtedly filled with pearls of my wisdom, such as "Diditalt er fantastisk! Men det er ikke sikkert, det er det rigtige for alle." Actually I think I might make more sense in Danish! Most of the images that accompany the article aren't mine, but the nudibranch used as a watermark on this page is.
June 2004 - 1000 Dives
Since I reached 500 dives a few years ago, I set myself the target of reaching 1000 dives before my 30th birthday, a landmark (or should that be seamark) I achieved with 8 months to spare this June. I could not have hoped for a better way to reach my millennium: on a great trip with my friends from BSoUP, at probably my favourite dive site "Ras Mohammed", diving on my own and having one of my best ever dives there. I spent most of the dive hanging out with the school of 70cm long bohar snappers, immersing myself in their ranks so that I could not longer see the open water above, below or around me. Photographically I was trying to get images of the school as seen from a fish's point of view: I shoot in available light, using a UR Pro filter to restore the colour (flash would only light up the first row of fish). This picture is a self portrait I took during that dive. You can read more about the trip here.
June 2004 - UWP 19 Cover and two articles
I am very proud that I have been writing for Underwater Photography Magazine since its first issue in August 2001. At the beginning of the year the magazine adopted its new horizontal format and the current issue is my first cover shot since the change. This issue also has two articles by me, one about going back to basic photographic kit co-authored by Giles Shaxted, and one about deep water ROV photography co-authored by Dan Jones. These contributions mean that I have now had 19 articles published in UWP the same number as there have been issues!
June 2004 - Diver Magazine Calendar
Last year Diver Magazine organised IMAGE 2003, the 10th International Festival of Underwater Photography. The magazine chose some of the award winning images were to illustrate their 2004 calendar. And now it is June I am pleased to be able to say that one of my images is the featured picture this month. This picture was taken on slide last June in the Red Sea. It was taken on the trip of left behind cameras, using kit I borrowed from Linda Dunk (thanks Linda). This June I am off to the Red Sea again with the same reprobates and I hope to make up for the lost time of last year!
May 2004 - DIVE Magazine's Big Shot
One of the things I like best about traveling is submitting pictures before going away and coming home to find them in print. It gets rid of all that waiting. On my return from Cayman I was pleased to find my heart shaped eels image, that I can't bring myself to call "Amore", featured as the big shot in the May edition of DIVE magazine. I am particularly pleased that this image was chosen because it comes from my one day of photography at the end of my disastrous trip to Egypt last year, when my cameras were left at Gatwick and only turned up in my penultimate day!
April 2004 - Tauchen Magazine Cover May 2004
I am always pleased when my images are featured in a publication for the first time, and I am
especially happy that my first picture in the large German diving magazine Tauchen made it to
the prime spot of cover shot. The image was taken with my Nikon F100 and 17-35mm lens on what was surely
my most productive ever photographic trip to Grand Cayman for 2 weeks in 2002. That trip not only yielded
this cover shot, but also four other images that won awards at the Antibes Festival in the same year. If
only every trip was like that! My friends in the UK have
been swift to point out I can now say that one of my body parts has been featured on the cover of a German Magazine!
April 2004 - Multi-tasking in Grand Cayman
I have just returned from spending most of the month in Grand Cayman. It was an incredibly busy trip as I balanced four main projects
alongside my own photography. The first week of the trip was continuing my photography on the Zen Diving project with writer Nick Hanna. Then during the second
week I was working on a Underwater Photography Magazine feature on basic photographic equipment with Giles Shaxted, as well as a natural history feature
on mating and speciation in Hamlet fish (the image shows mating shy hamlets). The final week was spent working inn both the office and ocean on the Grand Cayman
snorkeling guide with Steve Broadbelt of Ocean Frontiers. There is no way I could have got so many good images in as shot a peroid working in
a location other than Cayman, simply because I know it so well. You can read more about the individual projects on the Recent Projects pages.
