About Brian Skerry: Brian Skerry is an underwater photojournalist who works primarily for National Geographic magazine.
I finally became a scuba diver at age 15 or so, and a couple of years after that, I attended a dive show that is held every year in Boston. It's the oldest one in the world and it's still going on - it's called the Sea Rovers.
I've been diving for about 30 years, and I can honestly say that I've had some amazing encounters with sharks, squids, and other whales. But the encounter with the right whales in the Auckland Islands was probably the best thing I've ever done. It wa...
All in all, the dives I made in Fiordland were some of the best I've ever made.
New England waters are some of my favorite - they are some of the richest waters because they are temperate waters and nutrient-rich, and therefore provide food for so many animals, from giant whales to sharks to everything else.
Photography can be a powerful instrument for change, and photojournalists can tell stories that make a difference.
I still think there's a big part of the population that has a lot of misinformation about sharks. But I think it's beginning to change a little bit. As good information about sharks permeates popular culture, things may start to change.
Since the majority of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, not to mention much of the world's protein, it is not an exaggeration to say that when our oceans' health declines, our very survival is at risk.
Remove the predators, and the whole ecosystem begins to crash like a house of cards. As the sharks disappear, the predator-prey balance dramatically shifts, and the health of our oceans declines.
On Cape Cod, great white shark stocks have been growing, or at least becoming more concentrated, because of the multiplying numbers of seals around Monomoy Island. We are fortunate to have such abundance of these sharks in our own waters. Around the ...
Sharks don't particularly have a great interest in divers. It seemed that in a normal dive, I would jump in the water, and one or two gray reef sharks would swim in and kind of check me out - and then they would keep their distance. So they weren't p...
The Oceanic White Tip is considered one of the most dangerous sharks in the sea along with the Great White and Tiger. It is responsible for some of the most famous episodes of man-eating in history, such as when the U.S.S. Indianapolis sank in 1945.
I love storytelling, I love being a visual person, and it just made perfect sense to be an underwater photographer and explore the ocean and work with scientists.
As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.
I think that going to the beach as a child, being in the water and smelling that salt air and hearing the seagulls, it had a real calming effect. But also, it was a mysterious thing - I remember wondering what was under those dark New England seas.
I typically shoot underwater with my regular camera in an underwater housing, and then I usually have two big strobes that I use to light. But with whales, you're not going to be able to really light a 45-foot subject. Your strobes are only effective...
Most whale photos you see show whales in this beautiful blue water - it's almost like space.
Under the snowcapped mountains of Fiordland National Park, freshwater streams empty into the saltwater fiords, creating a unique ecosystem. This is a heavily wooded park, so the water in the streams is stained with tannin, a substance found in plants...
I swam with my first shark in the 1980s. I was 20 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, working with a group of marine scientists. Late in the day, a 5-foot long blue shark swam into our chum slick. For the next hour, I marveled at the animal's stunni...
I have been blessed to realize my dream of becoming an underwater photojournalist, but with that, I feel an obligation and sense of urgency to share what I have seen with others.
I have photographed sharks in waters around the globe, and I always want more and yearn to peer deeper into their world. To feed my passion and to raise awareness, I developed a story about sharks for 'National Geographic' magazine.
