How I Got the Shot: Photographing Great White Sharks off Cape Cod | National Geographic

I was trying to do something that hadn't been done before. That's it. Oh, I was trying to get a picture of a great white shark in Cape Cod, and that hadn't been done.

Messed up. I was using these seal decoys, swarming, doing aerial photography, using spotter pilots. This was just starting to stack up in a way that had me believing it might not ever happen since he said the water is very cloudy. Number one, there's only one animal, so the one is better than none.

Once you check one, two, two recording, that red light, gotta shut it off. Just we isn't this a little fun? What we have happening in Cape Cod is quite unique. We have a newly forming hub of great white shark activity. The sharks are coming in to feed on grey seals. Seal populations were wiped out in the 1600s, so because of that, you don't really see great white sharks very often. An occasional one, maybe. But the grey seal population has become robust in the last several years.

The sharks here are truly wild. They are not the least bit interested or habituated to human beings. You can't get them near the boat; they just won't be attracted by the boat. They seem to be only interested in these seals. So, to get a photograph in these very green, murky Cape Cod waters means you have to get close, and none of the traditional means would work.

So, my hope was by putting a camera inside a decoy, we could get a picture. Now we're putting on my seal decoy that has a still camera in it without worry about it after we set the video eyes so that I can see what's happening on it. My hope was that a great white shark would swim up and smile for the camera, the way generally not eat the decoy, and then I needed to be able to see in real-time when the shark was approaching the decoy. Otherwise, I'd be just sort of shooting blind.

We're using spotter pilots to find the sharks, but that's not good enough. Got a lot of expensive equipment on a boat; it's the octocopter. The advantage of this particular piece of equipment is it can lift a heavy camera with rock-solid stability. Every idea is to get this thing out there, hover it over the top of the decoy, see the circling behavior, and then that moment of impact.

Photographically, it'll be great, but we can also learn about the behavior that these sharks are demonstrating. You see, the white sharks here in Cape Cod are doing things differently than they do elsewhere in the world. We've seen these whites in very, very shallow water, you know, three to five feet of water.

Look at these right now; being able to observe that from a low-altitude bird's-eye view is gonna be really, really valuable. That's it. Yes, after many attempts at decoys and all these different things that I was trying, it had gotten... I'll go behind it; nothing is working. And then finally, when this right-sized decoy... whoa! Dorsals out of water, out the right size housing inside, and the wireless trigger and the video kind of stuff came together.

And I saw that trigger come on, right up to the tail of this thing, and I could see it. Oh, you the player, yeah! Yes, might bite it, come back! There you go! Yeah, yeah, I mean, you just steer that decoy for so long, and then all of a sudden, there's teeth and jaws just emerging from the water. I mean, I hope I got it. I hope I got it.

But I mean, I was shooting fast; it was right in the frame. I could see it. I could see, I actually saw the red of the gums, you know, with the teeth! Unbelievable! I mean, the beach was right there, the background desolate, couldn't be more than 12 feet of water. Let's go get the decoy!

Yeah, yeah, we got it! You got to collect your data; I just got the picture, that's all I care about. Oh man, very cool, very, very cool. You're like, at least six, I think...