Category Archives: Feature

Louise Murray dons her diving gear to photograph the Atlantic bluefin tuna

The Friday morning before I leave for Andalusia to shoot Atlantic bluefin tuna, I’m making a routine  test check of all my diving and underwater photography gear. A sticky button in the camera housing means that I cannot switch between stills and video. I call Fixation for an emergency assist and hastily make my way down for an urgent repair, before catching my flight later that day.

In Spain, it’s 32°C with a light breeze and I am just about to dive with 900 giant fish, each weighing between 150 and 200 kilos. Understandably I’m a bit nervous. I’ve been dressed in a black dry suit for over two hours and am struggling to stay cool. The boat is moored in a fattening pen about a mile offshore and we can see the huge fish swimming below the surface.

Here, fish captured in May are fattened up on a daily diet of defrosted sardines and mackerel before being sold to Japanese buyers in September. At least 10 tonnes of sardines have preceded me into the water today. This is not good. Fish scales are highly reflective and my underwater flash will bounce off them, a bit like using flash in a snowstorm!

For safety I have a dive buddy, Antonio. I’ve explained the nature of a fisheye lens and its 180-degree angle of view to him, so he is briefed to stay behind me unless I call him into a picture for scale. Antonio is there because although I am a certified commercial diver, these nets and others like them in fish farms worldwide are dangerous places to be. The powerful fish must swim constantly, and they do so in circles, meaning they create a vortex. The unwary can be sucked to the bottom of the net 30 metres down, or pushed against the outside of the swirling fish, where it’s easy to find dive gear or camera getting caught in the net. Alone, it’s quite possible to drown.

I’m here to complete a shoot of the tuna fishery for a German magazine – Unterwasser – producing an environmental piece about the state of the Atlantic tuna.

It has taken me since February, with the help of an excellent young translator called Polly, to negotiate diving with these magnificent fish. It’s now July. I’ve spent ages studying the tide tables and wind forecasts to find a small window when the sea surface will be calm, and visibility underwater acceptable. If you think topside shooting can be challenging, try working underwater. Imagine shooting in zero gravity you’ll get part of the picture, but then throw in wind, tides, currents and limited visibility – the variables are near-endless.

Fortunately I have excellent kit – an Aquatica housing for my Nikon D800 with a glass dome port which allows access to all of the camera’s controls while underwater, plus a couple of Inon flashes and a pair of Sola video lights.

Louise Murray with Nikon D800 in Aquatica housing on board the tuna dive boat at Barbate, Spain

Back at the hotel I finish downloading and backing up, and yes, predictably the shots are murky, turbid and full of reflective fish scales. And worse there is a reflected Nikon logo in some images when shooting into sun. This at least is easily rectified by sticking a plaster over the logo on the D800 and blacking it out with a marker pen.

I’ve managed to explain to Sebastian the boss why it’s so important for me to start shooting before the sardines go into the pen. Tomorrow I will be diving with 900 large, fast and hungry fish. Time for a cold beer.

The next day we travel offshore in a rolling swell. You need a good sense of balance and a strong stomach for this kind of work. This time I get in before the sardines, and the tuna – known as the Maseratis of the sea – are truly motoring in a tight swirl of fishy power. Antonio is with me and I get the shots over the course of an hour in the water.

Louise Murray and dive buddy Antonio

The dead sardines start to rain down in the latter half of the shoot, so I decide to try and focus on a single sardine, secure in the knowledge that there shortly be a 150-200 kilo fish blasting out of the blue with the intent of dispatching it. I don’t get the money shot, as the acceleration of this top ocean predator is hard to predict, and with limited visibility I can’t see them coming fast out of the blue.

A few more dives and eventually I would have nailed it, but the weather stopped cooperating and with high winds forecast for the next five days, I had to leave – me, my cameras and all of my dive kit stinking strongly of sardines.

The images from this shoot will be published in Unterwasser magazine, either late this year or early next year. The bluefin tuna remains classified as an “endangered species” by the IUCN, its population having declined by as much as 90% in some areas due to overfishing. A video from this shoot was selected as a featured clip by the Science Photo Library, and can be seen here.

Louise Murray is an award-winning freelance journalist and photographer whose work has been published in the Guardian, the Times, and countless international magazines, books and popular science publication, and can be found at louisemurray.com

We talk to Hugo Pettit about breaking the mould of sun-and-sand surfing photography when he caught some waves in the UK’s most icily inhospitable waters

“There’s no such thing as bad weather for surfing, just bad gear,” Hugo told us. “I want to prove that the depths of a UK winter are the perfect conditions for an adventure.”

We were both intrigued and inspired by Hugo Pettit’s passion and plans for his latest project, The Exploration Surf Trip, so agreed to lend him a few pieces of kit to help him achieve his vision.

Later, with a crew of sixteen people and a Land Rover full of camera gear, he set out to create powerful images and videos in a bid to show the world surfing doesn’t start and end at sunny beaches.

Now, with the project complete, we caught up with him to find out how things went.

Thanks for speaking to us, Hugo. Can you explain how the idea for this project came about?

Northern Scotland is somewhere I’ve always been desperate to discover. It’s very untouched and it’s quite important to me as part of my philosophy of exploring where you live. I think Brits are likely to be among the first to jump on a plane and head to the sand for a holiday and actually have little idea how beautiful their own island is.

Surf photography is quite a small market, but also a very saturated one. For instance, if you go to the Pipeline on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii, you’ll almost see more photographers than surfers! It’s madness and very far from what I wanted to do.

I wanted to portray how the UK surfing lifestyle is, in comparison to the more commercial areas like in the USA. It’s far more fickle here – you only get decent waves every now and again, you get snow, horrendous winds, water that’s so extraordinarily cold you have to put on six millimetres of wetsuit before you can even go in. These are the kind of things I wanted the project to highlight – that it’s not a namby-pamby surf holiday. Surfers go through a hell of a lot to get the ultimate feeling, the ultimate rush that a wave gives them and I really wanted to convey this.

What’s quite sad is that the majority of surf photography and videography doesn’t portray surfing as it actually is, but instead presents an idealistic view. So the idea was to pull something together that was raw and more than skin deep.

So where in Scotland did you go?

The team and I went up to John O’Groats, which if you’re coming from the south of England, is pretty much as far as you can travel in the UK. We hooked up with a company there called Natural Retreats who had these amazing little lodges overlooking the strait between Scotland and the Orkney Islands.

So we based ourselves there and travelled daily along the stunning north coastline. You’ve got amazing sea caves, beautiful white sandy beaches and massive granite slabs. In terms of coastal environment you’ve got a bit of everything – it’s vast and very varied.

Was it hard work to get the shots you needed?

Yes. Very, very hard work. I would have loved to have said this was nice and relaxing for me but I’d say this was the most stressed I’ve ever been. It meant so much, I was desperate to get it right, desperate to make sure that we covered all the aspects and that there was a story behind it.

The idea of portraying what’s really behind a surf trip ended up working very naturally because we had to battle with such extreme weather conditions. Some days we had no waves and were combatting blizzards and other days with beautiful sunshine and calm seas.

Do any particular days or memories stand out for you?

It’s difficult to pick out one in particular. The day after our arrival we arose at 6.00am and went to a famed local break called Thurso East. We surfed in a blizzard! There were chunks of ice floating in the water but that did not dampen our spirits. In fact, it made us even more excited to pursue the project.

We also saw the Northern Lights, something I’ve never seen before and which was frankly spectacular. We also had two days of some of the best waves I’ve ever seen and even spotted the odd seal and dolphin!

What camera kit did you use?

HP: We had some invaluable kit loaned to us from Fixation, including Canon EOS 5D Mark III and 7D Mark II, together with a variety of zoom lenses and vital AquaTech housing that allowed us to go beneath the waves. We also had a Sony FS700 and a couple of Sony A7S II bodies used for both stills and videos.

So you had lots of people shooting concurrently?

We did, which made it very interesting. Normally when you go to surf events you don’t want to be shooting the same thing as everyone else, but on a project like this the whole point is to work as a team to produce a single piece of content, rather than competing with other photographers and videographers.

It was amazing how eight photographers and videographers in a single location can see different perspectives and bring different creativity to the project. At a typical location we might have had eight people behind cameras; three people in the water shooting the surfing, one videographer, a stills photographer and an AquaTech user switching between moving image and stills.

Then you have photographers on land covering the landscape using drones. It was inspiring to see everyone on their feet and not getting lazy, despite the early mornings and late nights.

Few people regard the uppermost reaches of Scotland in winter as a top surfing destination. Hugo’s stunning images are a far cry from the sun-and-sand image most people have of surfing lifestyle, a view aided in part by the enduring popularity of conventional surf photography and videography.

To see more of Hugo’s work visit his website – and look out for more of Hugo’s projects featuring in future Fixation articles.