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March 2025

Current location: Kaikoura, New Zealand

Mads and I have been in Kaikoura, New Zealand, for the past few months – it’s been great! The days are getting shorter now, the first autumn snow is lingering on the mountaintops, and we’re starting to book our international travel for the year :)

  • O’Reilly’s Rainforest Resort for some bird photography with Dr Clare Prebble and her hubbie Dave,

  • Heading back to Wolf Rock for grey nurse shark surveys – thanks to the QLD Govt for continuing to fund that work! Come join me!

  • Oman to work on whale sharks with Chris, David, Elayne from One Ocean, Cameron from Georgia Aquarium, and hopefully the team from Atlantis Dubai will be able to join us too, as they’re funding. Looking to set up future Aqua-Firma trips there.

  • Cabo for some cheeky sharking prior to the liveaboard.

  • At this stage we still have a couple of spaces left on our MMF dive liveaboard to Socorro in Mexico – definitely one of the best

  • Visit the Florida Manta Project

  • Galapagos! This year was booked out immediately, but join us next year for an Aqua-Firma trip.

… then I’ll be back to Kaikoura for a breather in August, and to enjoy peak whale-watching season :D

Research Updates:

I’ve just wrapped up a couple a months in Queensland, Australia, leading photo-identification surveys of critically endangered grey nurse sharks. It’s been amazing! I’m posting about that work on Facebook at Grey Nurse Shark Watch but, in short, we did about two weeks diving at each of Wolf Rock (off Rainbow Beach) and ‘Shark Alley’ at Flat Rock, off North Stradbroke Island.

We were diving with Wolf Rock Dive at… Wolf Rock… and it was a great experience. I really like the team there, and Wolf is one of the best sites I’ve dived anywhere. We struggled with the weather earlier this year, but it was calm and settled through our July trip.

Jarrod Cameron, a PhD student at the University of Sunshine Coast (I’m part of his supervisory team)

Note his Insta.

Wolf Rock is the only known gestation area for grey nurse sharks in Australia.

Dive centres (at both locations I think?) have been actively participating in impact studies (link). Personally, my impression was that if people stayed to the sides of the gutter, the sharks seemed relaxed enough.

Wildlife & Underwater Photography:

SPH and WOW - link to blog

A1 II

Really enjoyed the 400–800 - some pics

135 f/1.8 - albatross

Akaroa trip

Random Gear Feature:

I’m typing this from my (non-)shiny new laptop! I got a beast of a Macbook Pro – the 16’ M4 Max with 64GB of RAM, a 4TB SSD, and the ‘nanotexture’ anti-reflective screen.

I’ve been using a 13’ M1 Macbook Air (16 GB RAM, 1TB SSD) since the start of 2021, and it’s still going great. However, I’m often dealing with large volumes of photos these days, especially when I’m playing at being a wildlife photographer, and I’ve been getting tired of waiting around for previews to load, DXO Pure Raw to process, and that sort of thing.

Given that I’ll be travelling a lot this year, I really wanted to bigger screen and more SSD space.

I’ve ordered a Black Ember (details, link) bag as my ‘personal item’ for travel.

I was kinda torn between the 16 and the 15’ Macbook Air. More ports, better screen, bigger SSD kinda swung it – then I thought I might as well spec it out, as it should last me a very long time!

Upcoming Events & Trips:

Ocean Wildlife Photography talk on March 26th at Ken’s Cameras in Christchurch (Sony link)

I might do this as a webinar again at some point – check my Sony profile.

Socorro liveaboard diving for MMF – other trips for the year are now full.

See 2026 trips for MMF (Raja Ampat) and Aqua-Firma (Galapagos and Komodo)

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