Alex has been enjoying diving locally during the pandemic and we will be sharing some of his incredible images taken on the south coast of England over the coming days. Here is what he has to say:

I am acutely aware of how lucky I am to live on the South Coast at this moment in time and with overseas trips being put on hold, I’ve been able to look to my own backyard to find sanctity and sanity, a brief escape from the madness of the world. In spite of my good fortune to live so close to some choice UK shore diving, it is still a very different diving experience from that of a luxury liveaboard, and it takes some careful planning and a lot more physical effort and dedication. Without local guide/spotters, you are on your own to find interesting subjects and photogenic situations, and at first sight, this seems impossible in the dark brown silt and sand. However, patience, sensitivity to the environment, and cumulative experience do bring their rewards.

I live in Bournemouth, some 45 minutes from my most visited dive site this year, Swanage Pier. A group of photo friends and I started diving as lockdown was lifted and have continued throughout the season and are still diving now when conditions allow. The beauty of this has been the opportunity to watch the site’s flora, fauna and even topographical features change in response to weather conditions and seasonal variation. We‘ve watched nudibranch species arrive, proliferate, lay eggs and then disappear. We’ve witnessed sea hares arrive in their masses, mate in huge groups and then vanish overnight. We’ve seen wrasse nesting, blennies laying and guarding eggs, anemone shrimp grow from teeny-tiny to almost filling their host snake locks anemone, jellyfish come and go in waves, and (shh) even the magical spiny seahorse pairing, brooding and giving birth in front of our eyes. As the nights draw in and the water cools (and for however long the South West continues to elude more serious lockdown), we are looking forward to more winter and night diving to briefly follow the lives of colder water and more nocturnally active species (although motivating ourselves in colder, damper conditions will be a challenge!).

Knowing that overseas diving is largely on hold (plus the marked slowdown in my day to day workload) has allowed me the time to take a new perspective on local UK diving. I have been able to approach each dive with a much greater level of mindfulness coming from a drop in urgency to make each dive as productive as possible. Returning day after day to the same few sites, revisiting the same critters, having more numerous windows into the lives of the animals has all afforded me with a much deeper level of intimacy with the local seas, for which I hope I will be ever grateful. 2020’s post lockdown sites for me were Swanage Pier, Kimmeridge Bay, the Weymouth/Portland region and I managed to sneak out for a three day break to Lundy Island.

I am also in the fortunate position of having access to new and exciting underwater photo products (what would an article from me be without a few commercial plugs?). Visiting the same sites, I could return with different lens and lighting combinations with ideas as to how to tackle the same subjects from very different photographic perspectives. Much of the shore diving on these sites, as you can see from the photos in this article, lends itself mainly to close up and macro/supermacro photography with windows of excellent visibility (and tangible excitement) when I was able to unleash the Nauticam Wide Angle Conversion Port on the critters. We have also recently received the Nauticam EMWL-1 (Extended Macro to Wide Lens) which is a long probe lens attached to the front of the flat macro port offering wide-angle perspectives of macro subjects. I had the pleasure of test driving the new Retra Pro flashes (with its ability to sync to shutter speeds far higher than the usual 1/250 as you can see in the jellyfish and sunburst shot) and the Backscatter miniflash (the easiest and most versatile snoot light option we have used), to understand first-hand how both are opening up new and exciting possibilities for underwater photography.

I’ll sit back now and let you enjoy the images. My final thought having revisited the image selection for this article is that I’d have never expected to have been able to repeat dive these same sites and to find such diversity and beauty in our local marine flora and fauna. If there is any upside for me to the current difficult situation, it could be that I would never have made to time to discover this had international dive travel still been an easy option.

Alex is the UK distributor for Nauticam and many more underwater photography manufacturers. You can see more of his beautiful images and buy some of the kit he used to take them by visiting his website here.