To celebrate World Photography Day, I sat down (over zoom) with Julia Sumerling – the talented photographer and videographer behind some of the Foundation’s most beautiful expedition imagery.

Julia has a talent for capturing the adventure of fieldwork, the mystery of insitu artefacts and, of course, the beauty of underwater seascapes.

Her work has been featured in documentaries and print by the BBC, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, ABC and SBS. She has travelled with her camera to Papua New Guinea, Japan, Sri Lanka, Pitcairn Island and the Bahamas, and closer to home, explored the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. Not to mention she’s won a number of awards including:

• QLD Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS) 2021 Gold Award – Ron Taylor AM ACS & Valerie Taylor AM Wildlife & Nature Award for “Fight For Our Reef“
• Short List – August 2017 – Australian Geographic Photographer of the Year Award
• 1st Prize – Feb 2016 Beneath The Seas Festival in New York, Underwater Photography Competition 2016, Marine Life Category
• Gold Award – 2009 Mission Beach Film Short Festival

Follow Julia online via her website and her Instagram @seajewlz (underwater photography) and @seajewlz_land_adventures (Tropical Queensland adventures above the water).

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

I studied commercial photography for three years, at Elizabeth TAFE in Adelaide, South Australia, in the early 1990s, before moving to Cairns. My studies were very technical, and film-based (digital photography wasn’t around then!).

I always loved the creativity of photography, and at times fought with the lack of artisticness in the commercial photography course, but I’m very glad I had the technical skills really drilled into me – the physics and chemistry of photography and The Zone System, which was created by Ansel Adams in the late 1930s.

More so than what I think you would be taught in art school because it really is an advantage when shooting underwater to have that knowledge and control of the camera.

I moved to digital photography 23 years ago, in 1999 with a 3MP camera, and have been working as a professional underwater photographer since 2002 really.

I grew up around the sea, and always loved it, so combining that with my photography skills was a very natural step. I got my first digital camera right after completing my first 100 dives for my PADI certification.  I just thought it was time that I took photos underwater.

When I finally got my Dive Master’s certificate, I actually got offered a job just taking photos with three-megapixel cameras of tourists on the reef. I basically started at the bottom and just took it from there. It was not really a creative job, and there wasn’t much adventure with it. It was just photographing tourists on one of the big pontoons.

So, I wrote out a list of all the things, all the qualifications I needed to get the best job in the business. And I spent the next three years ticking off that list: becoming a dive instructor, elements of shipboard safety, and a tourism guiding certificate. It was a big list.

But I worked out what boat I wanted to work on – Mike Ball Dive Expeditions – and by the time I had worked through my list, the dream job did come up, which led me to work in Papua New Guinea, and my love of shipwrecks and plane wrecks started from there.

It was just amazing seeing these huge machines, I guess, especially with the planes turned into something organic and beautiful. You dive down into the deep blue, and there’s a World War II B17 Bomber, with a 30m wingspan, laying quietly on the seafloor, encrusted with sponges and corals and bursting with colour and surrounded by fish. Then learning the history behind the wrecks after seeing this new life they’re breeding. Just fantastic.

A Canon 1DX Mark ii with a Nauticam Housing.

It’s a beautiful camera that shoots both video and photos. Even though the camera came out in 2015, it does an incredible job.

I use it in a Nauticam Housing with a wonderful wide-angle conversion port, which allows me to widen the field of view up to 130° and then zoom in and shoot close up. On a number of occasions, I have filmed manta rays and pygmy seahorses on the same dive. This port enables me to film a great diversity of shots, which is essential for the storytelling process.

I use Keldan Video Lights with 15000 lumens CRI95, which gives me stunning colour rendition underwater.  It sounds really bright, but once you’re underwater, the water absorbs so much light, you need something stronger than above the water. You really need good lights and strobes to get good photos at any depth.

Except for you know, you have to be really mindful of wildlife though. Certainly, with any large animals that I photograph like whales or you know, you’ve never use strobes or lights on those because you just need to be mindful of them reacting to the lights or blinding them.

In terms of lenses, I really use a 16-35mm wide-angle lens on my full-frame camera. It’s the ideal lens for underwater photography. And I do have fun with 8-15mm fisheye effect lenses when I want to do something artistic.

All the stuff that happens in the background. Actually shooting is like, 20% of your time. The rest of the time is admin and paperwork (invoicing, contracts, emails…), OR post-production and processing.

Each day of photographing in the field easily equates to at least one to two days of post-production editing. A one-minute or 90-second video will be several days in the editing suite to really get it right with the sound, music, titles and cuts.

I was working tourism boats, I would come out of the water from a dive and just rush to get changed, dry off the salt, pretty much, and then do that with my camera gear. But then after that what I’m doing is frantically editing, for the next several hours to get a product out by the time we’re coming back to shore. Very tight timeframes.

From the first expedition I did with the Silentworld Foundation, there’s a photo of this massive anchor wedged in the reef, which is extraordinary.

We found a lot of anchors on that expedition, which is amazing. They’re just incredible.

It was probably about the second or third last day of the expedition, and the leaders of the expedition always make sure everyone on board gets in the water to see these amazing pieces of history we’ve located and recorded. So we did a dive, where we took out some of the boat crew to see the anchors.

I was on the windward side of the reef. It was a really calm day and I could see bubbles coming out of this cut on the reef. I’m fairway away from everything else and I’m like, “Who’s over there, what’s going on?”, because they were there for a while.

And I swam over to this crevice, looked down and there was the host, Morgan, there with this huge anchor, seemingly wedged on the reef, right above the crevice.

It just looked incredible. Surprisingly, when I got a closer look, the anchor was quite stable, so I actually got down into the crevice and took these photos looking straight up, through the anchor.

The colour, the location, just phenomenal. We’ve seen some incredible sights on these expeditions, but to find the anchor there, wedged into the reef. I think it was dated from the 1820s – it was a really early ship – and I got to use my creativity to really capture it, looking up and through the anchor.

It wasn’t just about creating a record for the archaeologist, of the expedition’s finds.

I went back with my 8-15mm lens the next day to create a fisheye shot of the site, and I think it was really worth the time and effort, a bit of love, a bit of artistic creativity into getting that wonderful shot.

• Get in the water as often as you can
• Learn from your mistakes
• Always test your camera gear before you get in the water

There are so many things that can go wrong underwater, and because you’re underwater because you’re diving, it’s hard just to come up and fix the issue. So, part of your learning curve is getting things like lens caps off, inserting memory cards and batteries charged. From forming good habits of testing all your equipment before getting in the water, will help reduce the frequency of mistakes that are easily made.

Before I get in the water, I test everything is working. I take test photos, test my lighting, test my strobes, so there’s no way in the world I can forget my battery or memory card or worse, finding out you’ve got a lens cap on when you get underwater. You have to find a way to avoid that.

Is a trip to dive on SS Yongala, just south of Townsville. It’s a really special place for me. Like the wrecks I saw in PNG, Yongala has that almost…mythical…combination of fascinating history (it’s a tragic story) but it is also a real mecca for marine life. It’s just so beautiful what that tragedy has become, another thriving artificial reef.

So yes, hoping to head there with some scientists and friends. It’s just a short drive for me, which is good that it doesn’t involve getting on a plane at the moment (given the pandemic), and I can just spend a few days hanging out with fish, my camera and wonderful history.