Great White Shark Photo Shoot: Don't Try This At Home | National Geographic

Look at him right here! God, he's big. Whoa, look at the size of that animal coming right at us! I am in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which over the last few years has become sort of great white shark central. Man, look at all the seals! That explains everything, doesn't it? Wow!

I have spent over 5 months trying to figure out how to make a photograph underwater in Cape Cod of great white sharks. Uh, right now we're just offshore here. This is the area where the shark was hunting. Look at him, he's right there! Holy God, look at him! Come on, man, just smile! Come up to the back. Now he's going inshore! Damn!

What I've ultimately done was worked with researchers who had begun to design sealed decoys as a way of attracting the sharks. Holy God, look at them! Oh yeah, he's just deep. He's by—oh yeah, oh yeah! I had the idea of trying to modify their decoys with cameras. We created a wireless trigger system. I could remotely fire the camera from the boat.

Put her in! There's three sharks within our boat radius here, right in here. Boy, is that nice! Look at how close he is! Nice shallow water. Kids are freaking out! People have no idea just how close these sharks are to the beach. I mean, you could wade in and bump into one of these animals. We have a shark coming from the south, coming north, and we're going to put one of our research decoys in and see if we can observe a predation in what is now about 15 ft of water.

There he is, he's coming! Come on, that's it, come on! I see him! Oh, holy—there you go! Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, man, right at us! I mean, he came right like this! Man, that was sweet!

We might have a picture! That's what I've been thinking about all winter, this particular photo. It was crystal clear; you can see deep into the animal's eye. You can see this sort of smile that these sharks have. But this animal also had some scratches on its face that I can only presume were caused maybe by an attack on a seal. We nicknamed it Mike Tyson because it had like a face tattoo.

I wanted to create this sort of intimate portrait of one of these animals. I wanted to put a face on this shadowy creature that has been portrayed as a monster and show what they look like. To my knowledge, this is the first time a high-quality or high-resolution still photograph of a great white shark in Cape Cod waters has ever been produced, has ever been made. It took months and, you know, a lot of gray hair to figure out how to do it, but it finally was achieved.