Ocean Photographer of the Year accessibility - Adventure

The Ocean Adventure Photographer of the Year is awarded to the photographer who most successfully celebrates our love and fascination of life in, on and around the ocean.

Winner Tobias Friedrich

Tobias Friedrich is a German professional underwater photographer and cinematographer. His images have been published in prestigious scuba diving magazines and newspapers around the world.

Location The Bahamas 
Equipment Canon 1DX Mark II, SEACAM housing, two SEACAM Seaflash 150D, Canon 8-15mm fisheye lens 
Settings 1/160, f/7.1, ISO 200 
Image size: 135 x 135cm

Wall text
A scuba diver looks tiny in front of a shipwreck. “Due to bad weather conditions we had to seek shelter near Nassau where we looked for alternate dive sites,” remembers Friedrich. “We decided to dive on this wreck which had been intentionally sunk by a dive centre. The sand under the bow was washed out which made it an excellent photographic opportunity.”

About The Image
The image was taken at midday while scuba diving from a boat on a calm but windy day, with a slight swell.

Sunlight plays on a wide triangle of water in the top left. Cutting across the image on a diagonal, is a sunken, long, low-profile vessel, covered in algae. The vessel is lower at the front, closer to us and extends to the top right corner of the image. It rests on a sandy reef bed crusted with coral that drops away beneath its front end. The reef, and the ship’s hull before us are bathed in greenish-white light. Further off, the deep water is a vibrant, hazy blue.

On our left, in the blue sea above the wreck swims a lone diver. The diver’s knees are bent and their flippered feet are mid-kick. The miniscule, wet-suit clad human shines an ineffectual torch, an orb of white light in the water.

In the centre of the image, the sandy, coral bed has eroded. The sunken vessel’s precariously angled hull threatens a descent into the dark blue water, whispering from below in the bottom left. A wide gap yawns, the vessel’s long shadow falling onto the reef beneath. The boat is aged by a carpet of mottled algae and its softly bearded underside hosts fringes of growth, silhouetted against the deep blue. Algae attracts small fish. Two pale, flat, fish are swimming in the wedge of water-filled nothingness between the ships weight and the curving reef floor.

On deck, a short mast juts towards the surface of the water at a jaunty angle. Knobbly metal equipment clusters around the pole.

In the foreground at right, clumps of dull vegetation cling to the scraggy, sandy mound pf reefbed. In the top right, in the murky blue at the rear of the ship, is a boxy cabin. Its dimensions are shrouded by distance in the filmy blue ocean. Around the cabin is speckled with small, light and dark fish.

The majesty of the image is in its scale. A tiny human, floating out in front of a vessel more than 100 times their size, the diver’s torch, a pin-spot of artificial light. A long, crusty wreck poised on a sharply angling reef in the vast blue ocean, seemingly close to calamity.

The Ocean Adventure Photographer of the Year is awarded to the photographer who most successfully celebrates our love and fascination of life in, on and around the ocean.

Winner Tobias Friedrich

Please feel free to touch and explore.

A scuba diver looks tiny in front of an algae incrusted shipwreck. It rests on a reef bed. The sand under the bow is washed away.