Swimming With Sharks: Photographing the Ocean’s Top Predators (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live

What I'd like to share with you this evening is some of my latest work for National Geographic about sharks. Or, as we say where I come from in Massachusetts, sharks. Over the last two years, I've worked on four separate projects. Four separate stories about the top predatory species of sharks on planet earth.

And the idea was, this was done in hopes by running 'em as Greg said, by running these stories consecutively in the magazine, we ran three of 'em, one more upcoming. The idea was to sort of give these animals somewhat of a makeover. I think the hope, at least my hope, was to change or replace fear with respect. Because nobody respects sharks more than I do. Believe me, nobody respects sharks more than me.

But what I also wanted to do tonight, in addition to showing some of this brand new work or the latest work, was to include some earlier work that might give a little context to these new stories because for me, sharks have been sort of this lifelong pursuit, something that has fascinated me for a very long time. I wanted to sort of give context to how I arrived at these new stories by looking at some of the early stuff.

I actually saw my very first shark in the wild back in 1982. It was off the coast of Rhode Island in very murky waters out there. I was about 20 years old at the time and I had been invited to join a group of marine biologists that were doing their own sort of little private trips out there, and they were led by a scientist named West Pratt, who built his own shark cage, sort of this little chicken wire cage that he made. He would go offshore and put a little chum in the water and hope to see mostly blue sharks.

So I can remember standing in that cage just below the surface on sort of a mildly rough day and waiting for hours, just staring out into the gloom, hoping to see a shark. I was just about ready to give up hope when at about four o'clock that afternoon, that first shark appeared. It was a female blue shark, about six feet long.

And the instant I saw her, I was both instantly amazed and sort of hypnotized, stunned by that beautiful blue color that they have on their backs, sort of glowed in that afternoon light. Without really thinking about it, I opened the door of the shark cage and swam outside. Because the shark wasn't coming close enough to the cage and I really wanted to get close and to make pictures. The scientist later told me that I was the first person to ever swim outside the cage, but I just had to get close; I needed to be up close to this animal.

Now, my heart was racing in those moments. There was a real mix of emotions. On one hand, I was thinking, what do I do if she comes at me? What do I do if she tries to bite me? And on the other hand, I was just so thrilled to finally be out there in the middle of the ocean with this gorgeous animal. She moved elegantly through the water, sort of meandering her way around, coming pretty close at times and clearly aware of my presence, but really paid me little attention. It was as if she was on her own mission, some ancient journey that didn't include me, and I was just a momentary distraction.

After a few minutes, she sort of just moved away from me and swam toward the boat. I watched her glide into the shadows and then disappear into that late day light. She was gone. And once again, I found myself sort of just drifting alone in that emerald green sea, feeling like I was waking up from a dream and wondering if it was all really true, if this had really happened, this first encounter.

Now the first encounter that I had with a wild shark, as I said, happened when I was about 20 years old. That was four years after I became a certified scuba diver. My very first C card, right here. I was about 16 years old. Kinda stunning actually how little I've changed since I was 16. But I became a diver because I had this deep desire to explore the ocean and to photograph animals like sharks. That was a big reason why I wanted to become a diver.

And until I had that first experience with the blue shark, these animals seemed almost like mythical creatures to me, like a unicorn. I'd read about them, but until you actually are in their presence, it doesn't really seem real. So that first experience with the blue shark had me completely hooked, no pun intended. I really knew that I needed more, that I wanted more. There was something about these animals that captivated me, that fascinated me, and I knew I had to get back out into the sea as often as I could.

Just brief moments, even with these animals. They're difficult to photograph, and it takes a lot to get out there and see them, but I knew that if I could just get out there a little bit more, maybe I could satisfy that desire. I think part of what attracted me to these animals was the fact that many species of sharks, of course, are powerful predators. Big apex predators. And there's an attraction to that. I wanted to experience that for myself up close.

For those of you who have dived with sharks, I think you can attest to the fact that there is this seductive blend of grace and power that sort of exudes from these animals. It's palpable when you're in their presence. But as a photographer, I also became somewhat obsessed with sharks from a visual perspective. Throughout millions of years, nature has sculpted these animals to be perfect for life in the sea. These very hydrodynamic bodies. For me, they became a subject that I just wanted to constantly photograph and always wanted to try to showcase.

I wanted to get that ultimate shark photo, to really show their beautiful shape and form. And there are many different types of sharks, so it was a lofty goal. About a decade after I made that very first blue shark picture, I had that very first encounter in 1982. In the mid-nineties, I made this photo of another blue shark near my home in New England and I went into the water that particular day wanting to make a picture that really showed and accentuated their exquisite contours.

This was an animal that truly has been sculpted and has that beautiful long slender body and those beautiful big pectoral fins that help it glide through the ocean. It was a bright sunny day, but in order to make that photograph, I selected a very high aperture to turn the background sort of black and just lit the dorsal side of the animal as it passed below me. That little red thing streaming off the dorsal fin is actually a parasitic copepod, a little pelagic hitchhiker that was adding a dash of red color to the otherwise blue background.

So as my work evolved and continued with sharks, I continued to focus on these forms and shapes, looking at individual body parts. The dorsal fin of a lemon shark. In this case adorned with a trio of remoras, these parasite fish. Or the giant unusual head of a great hammerhead shark. A very bizarre looking animal that almost looks prehistoric. But scientists actually tell us that these are animals that are more evolved than other species of sharks because their nostrils have separated out to either side of that giant hammerhead and they sort of have stereoscopic smell. They're a little bit of a one-upmanship in the game of evolution in the ocean.

And I also sort of developed this fascination with shark tails. Most photographers, of course, want to photograph the mouth or the front end of the shark, but I became really attracted, sort of hypnotized by the tails. Many species like this tiger shark or Makos and Great Whites, which we'll see shortly, have these exquisite tails and a really powerful tail. And, you know, now with digital photography, I had the luxury of being able to shoot more frames, not relegated to 36 on a roll of film so I could experiment more and take these kinds of pictures and sort of satisfy this weird obsession I have with shark tails.

But one of the other things that was important to me, one of the things that I tried to do with photography, was to make pictures that allowed us or allowed animals like sharks to sort of display their exceptional biology. Sharks have evolved over hundreds of millions of years. They haven't really changed in hundreds of millions of years because they're perfect for their life in the ocean. But I wanted to make images that would allow, let's say, the text in a story to talk about some of these features, like their eyes.

Most sharks have eyes that are exceptionally good in dark water. We know that a cat can see really good in dark light, but sharks can see twice as good as the cat can. And these animals have skin that is made up of millions of tiny little teeth, they're called dermal denticles, but they're very hydrodynamic and help the animal efficiently swim through the ocean. I don't know if you can see in the photo, but they've also evolved these little dots on their nose, on their snout there. These are called ampullae of Lorenzini, and they're a nerve ending that allows the shark to detect electrical impulses in the water like the beating heart of a fish.

So if they're hunting in very murky water where eyesight doesn't work, they can use those ampullae of Lorenzini to hone in on their prey, so just amazing predators. Being able to make pictures that allowed the text to talk about that was important. And in terms of evolution, I also wanted to show that, you know, a shark is not as a shark as a shark, that they've all developed and evolved morphologically for the environment that they happen to inhabit.

And even with things like their teeth, they're not all the same at all. This is a sand tiger shark that I photographed in Japan, and you can see those sort of long slender teeth that the sand tiger has, which are very different than a regular tiger shark. This is a tiger shark and you can see those sort of triangular serrated teeth here that the tiger shark has, which are used for chomping into their prey, which is often things like sea turtles, sorry for the sea turtle fans in the audience. But they're very different.

So making these kinds of pictures helped, I think, readers and helped give some dimension to these animals. And I also wanted to photograph species like the whale shark, which doesn't have teeth at all, or the teeth that it has are very, very small. This is a plankton feeder, not a predatory shark but the biggest fish in the ocean. This is one that I photographed in Mexico and was sort of entranced by this living wreath of baitfish that was encircling its head as I was free diving alongside of it there that day in these coastal waters that were very green.

I actually saw my very first whale shark in western Australia back in 1995. Giant animal, and I can remember we were using spotter planes to go out and sort of find them, and then when they found one, they would radio to the boat and tell us where it was, and we'd position ourselves way in front of it and I would slip into the water and just sort of wait there snorkeling for this animal that materialized out of the blue, and it was like swimming next to a dinosaur. That's the closest thing I could imagine. Just silently emerges and then sort of fades off into the gloom.

But despite my own personal fascination and love of sharks, I realized that these are animals that for many people are something to fear, something that they don't like. There's still the old adage that the only good shark is a dead shark, and sharks have been portrayed as demons, something that must be killed. This has certainly been true in modern times, of course, with films like Jaws. Even though Jaws sort of demonized sharks, I have to say I do love that film, but for other reasons.

But we were sort of demonizing and villainizing these animals long before Jaws, the book, or the movie came out. This is a painting that was done by John Singleton Copley in 1778 that's called Watson and the Shark, and it shows this monster-like shark about to eat this woman that's fallen in the ocean and all these people are being terrorized. I think for a very long time, sharks have been portrayed as these sort of shadowy one-dimensional monsters that don't have any depth to them. They're just out there waiting to eat us the second we put our toe in the ocean.

The reality, of course, is that although they are predators and have the potential to do harm to humans, we're definitely not on the menu. These are actually rather complex animals; science is only beginning to fully understand them. They are very, very complex creatures, and they play a vital role in the health of the ocean. So as I worked on new stories for the magazine, I wanted to produce images that would allow people to see sharks in new ways, in new light, and help change some of these misconceptions that exist.

Whenever possible, I wanted to make images that showed sharks within their environment because what we've learned over time is that healthy ecosystems in the ocean depend on healthy populations of predators, particularly animals like sharks. This is an image that I made of a Black Tip Reef Shark in a place called Millennium Atoll out in the middle of the central South Pacific. One of these places that, because of its remoteness, has remained largely unspoiled, and it's a very sharky place. The biomass of predators like sharks is very high there, and there's a direct correlation between the number of sharks and the health of the coral reefs. This is science that Enric Sala and his Pristine Seas team, who I think might be here tonight, have sort of proven.

I saw it not only in these places but in other places. I was on an assignment for the magazine a number of years ago in New Zealand doing a story on marine reserves, and I was in Fiordland, this very shadowy, sort of Lord of the Rings place. And diving in the temperate water there. I was photographing macro life on the wall, these colorful little tiny animals. And I looked up and in the distance, saw this Sevengill Shark, a very prehistoric-looking animal, sort of coming at me. So I swapped my macro rig for a wide angle that my assistant was holding and was able to make a single frame.

But again, the correlation is between healthy shark populations and healthy oceans; it's a direct correlation, and that's what I've learned. So whenever possible, I want to make images that sort of speak to that relationship. It was the same everywhere I went. You'd go to places that saw dead coral reefs in parts of the Caribbean, let's say, and you just didn't see many sharks. Or I went to the Bahamas, places in the Bahamas where the reefs were pretty healthy, and there were lots of sharks around, so you could see it; it was quite evident.

And in my work as it evolved, I also wanted, particularly in the stories for National Geographic, to try to show readers a little bit more of the lives of sharks, a little bit more of the life cycle, particularly focusing for a period of time on baby sharks, on shark pups. Because at the time I made this photo of a lemon shark pup in Bimini in the Bahamas, I hadn't really seen a lot of images of this kind of thing, but it's a very important part of the equation. Most folks just wanna look at the big scary sharks with the jaws and the teeth and the blood and that kind of thing, but this is an important part of the equation.

Lemon shark pups have their babies in mangrove nurseries in these very shallow places where trees grow out of the water. It's a place where big predators can't get in. And the lemon sharks live for the first two to three years of their lives in these nurseries where they feed and eventually get big enough to go out and compete on the reef. But this was a fairly newborn lemon shark pup that was maybe only 12 inches in length swimming in about a foot deep of water. I spent days laying in that mangrove trying to get the sharks to build up their courage and come close, and after I left this place, I'd learned that some of these mangroves had been bulldozed so that a golf course could be made for a resort. This is the only shark nursery for 150 miles around, and it's critical habitat, so these are vital.

So having images like this within the context of a story, I think, helps people to understand the importance of protecting places like this. And whenever possible, I also wanted to show behavior with sharks; it's a little hard to do sometimes, but we're working on a story about the Mesoamerican Reef. It's the second largest barrier reef in the world. I was able to photograph Caribbean reef sharks predating on lionfish. Now, as you may know, lionfish are invasive species in the Atlantic Ocean. They've sort of just exploded, and there haven't really been any great solutions to eradicating them.

There are some places where divers will go down and try to spear them, and it's had some low-level impact but in Roatan in Honduras, there was a shark biologist that over a couple of years had been trying to train the local Caribbean reef sharks to acquire a taste for these. He'd initially spear them and feed 'em to them, and over time they began to naturally predate on them and it was controlling the population; they were beginning to go down and naturally predate on that. So that was important too.

But at the end of the day, I mostly really hope that by showing sharks as something beautiful, as just beautiful animals, making pictures that would intrigue the reader and making them wanna know more might dispel some of that fear. Again, that shadowy, looking at pictures like Copley, Copley that just make them look like monsters isn't gonna help anything. But if we can show these animals as more beautiful, maybe not quite dolphins, but certainly something to marvel at.

And while working on a story about sharks of the Bahamas a few years for the magazine, I spent 18 days in wintertime in the Bahamas trying to get a photo of the elusive great hammerhead that we see here. But because of the rough weather that we had at that time of year, I only had two days where I could actually work, and I made this frame on the very last night at sunset when this big fourteen-foot male sort of just swirled in just below the surface. But the idea was that my hope is that a photo like this might engage people or readers in the magazine. They wanna read the caption and hopefully the story and learn that hammerhead populations in the last 20 years or so in the Atlantic Ocean have declined about 89%.

These are animals that we don't know very much about; we don't know where they travel to or from necessarily, we don't know where they mate, we don't know where they have their pups, and we're losing them faster than we can learn about them. So to be able to make beautiful pictures or engaging images of sharks, I think is a big part of it. The fact is almost every species of shark out there in the world is in real trouble, certainly all the predatory species, and they really do need our help.

So as my career evolved, I wanted to turn my camera toward some of the darker side of what was happening to sharks as well because I felt it was necessary to show people what was happening to these animals and the global slaughter that was occurring around the world. A lot of sharks are killed for food, but the truth is this is wildlife, and every single year right now on planet earth, more than 100 million sharks are being killed. I mean, think about that number: 100 million sharks. We can't kill 100 million apex predators and expect any ecosystem to be healthy, and that's certainly the case here.

So as I worked on these kinds of stories, I sort of got away from trying to make beautiful pictures and approached it more like war photography. I wanted to make images that would grab people's attention, so it was dead sharks being cut up on a beach or a dead Mako shark in a gill net. And showing another Mako here on the beach being finned. You know, most of those sharks, the 100 million or whatever the actual number is, maybe more than 100 million, most of those are killed for their fins for the soup fin business in the shark fin soup that's very popular in Asia. That's what's happening here; they fetch a very high price, so that's the first thing that the fisherman goes for.

And as I was working on this story, it was a story about the global fish crisis, the problems of overfishing, and shark fishing was a big component of that. I really wanted an image that would create some empathy for these animals. I think this picture might have done it, but it was actually one morning when I jumped in the water in the Sea of Cortez and came along a gill net where this Thresher shark had just recently died and its eye was still open. Because it's a pelagic animal, it had these great big pectoral fins like we saw on the blue shark earlier. As I framed it up in my camera's viewfinder, it sort of struck me as a crucifixion, and I thought that maybe that would give some empathy to these animals that really are in trouble and need our help.

It became the lead picture in that cover story in 2007, but it's gone on to have a life beyond that, being used by a number of conservation organizations as well to sort of beat that drum and help people understand the plight of sharks. So all of this sort of prelude brings me to the work that I recently did for National Geographic, these series of four stories about some of the top predatory species of sharks.

As Greg mentioned, we ran three of them this summer in June, July, and August, and we have one story yet to be published, a story on Mako sharks that will be upcoming. And you know, I think my hope was that by doing that, as I mentioned earlier consecutively, readers would come to see these animals as different, as to some degree having personality and as being something that we can not only respect but really marvel at.

I don't have any illusions that sharks or fish, which is what they are of course, will ever be held in the same regard that a furry mammal. I think we have a national affinity to terrestrial animals, particularly cute animals that live in the forest, but I do think that if we can show these animals as miracles of evolution, then maybe we can get some respect. And if we get the respect, then appreciation, and move that dial a little bit in terms of conservation.