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was out at the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center
(AUTEC) submarine buoy with Stuart Cove to photograph
silky sharks, and I saw this weird thing in the distance. I wasn’t
even sure it was a living thing, but as we were in water that was
7,000 feet deep I thought it could be some deep-water creature.
I snapped a shot and sent it to National Geographic. They ran it,
and now it has been published in 14 or 15 countries.
But there were a couple other stories that were probably
of greater significance to my career. One was a lone
beluga whale in Nova Scotia that I’d heard was particularly
interactive with divers. I traveled there and shot it totally on
spec, coming up with a natural history story that I made into
a children’s book in 2000 called A Whale On Her Own.
Another was the pirate ship Whydah that I photographed off
Cape Cod. That was particularly challenging because it was my
first assignment for National Geographic, and I knew if I blew
it the odds of getting called a second time were infinitesimal.
The visibility was horrible — made worse by excavation —
and the subjects were low profile and monochromatic. But
by using divers holding incandescent lights to reveal the big
picture and shooting macro photos of artifacts when they were
discovered, I delivered a compelling story. National Geographic
was beginning to believe in me. Today, after 20 stories for
National Geographic over the past 14 years and five stories
in development at the moment, I still approach each of them
knowing you’re only as good as your last one.
SF//
I see you as an environmental photographer, and
the first story that defined you in that niche was your
coverage of harp seals.
BS//
Thanks for remembering! That was the 2002-03 season
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and my first big natural-history
story. In February and March the seals in Nova Scotia and
Newfoundland would court, breed and give birth on transient
ice patches. The hunt for these animals represented the
largest mass slaughter of marine mammals on the planet,
and that was a big part of my story. The vulnerability of these
charismatic megafauna was both captivating and so severe
it endangered the survival of the species. The other issue I
covered in that story was the loss of sea ice due to climate
change, a problem that has proven to be a game changer for
these animals. Now, just a decade later, the habitat loss turned
out to be the much greater hazard. The harp seal needs only
14 days from birth to self-sufficiency, but without stable ice
the pups fall into the water and die. I’m told the pup mortality
rate for the 2010-11 season is 100 percent. They’ll have to
evolve and adapt or go extinct. The issues are that frightening,
and the changes are happening in our oceans that swiftly.
I pitched the global fish crisis story to National Geographic
because I wanted to be a sort of war photographer going
after the gritty story of what was happening to marine life on
this planet. I wanted people to understand the magnificence
a gillnet in Mexico’s Sea of Cort
a female leatherback turtle cra
from the sea under moonlight
nest on Matura Beach in Trinida
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