Soft Coral Garden

This beautiful soft coral is growing on the hull of the SS Yongala, wrecked more than 100 years ago. It's a beautify, diverse ecosystem brimming with life.

Taking a closer look

Lady Elliot Island in Australia has a large population of turtles of various species and is a breeding site for a number of these. The turtles here are completely unperturbed by human presence and are a joy to swim with. This Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas) was enjoying munching on the algae overgrowing some dead coral when it spotted reflections in my dome and swam over to have a closer look.

Sunset splits

Humpback happiness

This Humpback Whale calf is just a few weeks old and we would have been some of the first human beings that it had ever seen, so it stopped by to check us out. For scale, a humpback calf at birth is between 3 - 5 meters long and weighs in at almost a tonne. Her mother however, will be four times this size and can weigh as much as 30 tonnes. It's the difference between a campervan driving past vs. a full sized bus. Humpback mothers migrate from the cold but nutrient-dense waters of antarctica up to the warm waters of Tonga to give birth to their young. During this migration they stop feeding and live entirely off stored fat, even while providing all the nutrients necessary to nourish their calves. By the time they return South they can have between 25 and 50% of their body mass. Talk about the sacrifices of parenting!

Christmas Tree Worm

Manta Way

Drawaqa Island in Fiji is home to a channel between two islands where Reef Manta Rays (Mobula alfredi) patrol up and down both feeding and being cleaned at cleaning stations. This individual was particularly curious: I'd recently jumped in the water and hadn't yet set up my strobes so the first two times she approached me I just floated on the surface and let her approach on her own terms. She must have been particularly curious about my camera as she came back for a third pass and this time I ducked just under the surface to get a shot of her swimming over the top of me. To me this is such a great example of the gentle, inquisitive nature of Manta Rays.

Coral Polyps - Fiji

The little bundles of what look like bright yellow jelly beans are the tentacles of individual coral polyps, safely encased in their Calcium Carbonate skeleton.

Portal to the deep

This shot looks up through one of the deck port-holes of the SS Yongala towards the surface. The Yongala is considered a sacred site because of the crew and passengers on board who went down with the ship, so penetration of the wreck is not permitted.

Green Turtle - Great Barrier Reef

This beautiful Green Turtle was very happy for us to float and watch him as he chowed down on algae growing on patches of dead coral.

Catfish Constellation

Juvenile striped eel catfish form tightly packed shoals and roam around the reef looking like a single super-organism. I wanted to capture this duality - individualism in the context of a greater whole, and this required the shoal to be neatly packed together and all facing me. This required predicting the direction that the catfish would swim in, then swimming down and lying on the sandy bottom on breath-hold, waiting with baited breath to see whether they would approach despite my presence.

Welcome to my house

This moray eel was very comfortable in his crevice in the hull of the SS Yongala wreck.

Stay focussed

At Kuata Island in Fiji we would regularly have 30+ Bull Sharks join us for the shark feed that we run. During COVID the feed was stopped and I was lucky enough to join a group of shark scientists who used the restarting of this feeding as an opportunity to better understand the behaviour of the local population. I wanted to capture the speed and grace of these beautiful creatures and the way that as apex predators they demand your fully focussed attention while you're underwater with them, so used a slow shutter speed and tracking motion to achieve this.

A dash of colour

We quite frequently bump into fleets of Bigfin Reef Squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana) while snorkeling in the late afternoon around Lady Elliot Island in Australia. They're funny animals as they're inquisitive enough to approach you but stay just far enough away from you to make them difficult to photograph well. However, with proper lighting and a boatload of patience it's possible to capture their beautiful colouration, which they use for both camouflage and communication with one another.

The boundless energy of youth

While his adult companions relaxed on the rocks or rolled around on the surface, this juvenile NZ Fur Seal was having the time of his life whizzing around our heads. Frozen in motion here, he was going at quite a pace for this shot - it was a bit of luck to capture him in such a fantastic pose.

Coral Canyons - Great Barrier Reef