Vancouver Island photographer showcases award successful work in Victoria

While most individuals start their mornings by placing on a go well with to move to the workplace, Nanaimo based mostly marine conservation photojournalist Shane Gross has a unique routine to get to his job.

He wears a diving go well with, oxygen tank and underwater digicam gear to prepare for his job.

Nanaimo’s Shane Gross is a multi-award successful photojournalist, featured on the Wildlife Photographer of the Year presently being exhibited on the Royal BC Museum. (Courtesy of Shane Gross Facebook)

The work of Vancouver Island’s Gross is displayed on the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, presently being exhibited on the Royal BC Museum. His work is titled Like an Eel Out of Water, and he’s Canada’s solely class winner for the 2025 competitors 12 months.

Speaking to Victoria News, Gross expressed how excited he’s to be featured on the exhibition.

Gross grew up in Regina, Sask. and wished to be a marine biologist, however ended up in enterprise college. The turning level in his life was when he was backpacking by means of Australia after commencement in 2019. He got here throughout {a magazine} that includes the successful picture from the 2004 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competitors: two sharks exploding by means of a bait ball, mouths stuffed with fish.

“That image made something click. I realized photography could be my way into the ocean,” he mentioned.

From that second, he pursued underwater pictures with full dedication. Nearly a decade spent dwelling and dealing within the Bahamas adopted, the place he refined his expertise, developed a powerful deal with storytelling, and have become extra concerned in conservation work with non-profit organizations.

After the Covid 19 pandemic hit, he was compelled to go away the Bahamas. He returned to Canada with a easy query: the place is the most effective place within the nation for an underwater photographer? The reply led him to Vancouver Island.

“It’s a rare and special place,” he mentioned. “You can regularly see giant Pacific octopus, wolf eels, and kelp forests. That’s extraordinary.”

Over greater than 15 years underwater, he has encountered a few of the ocean’s most iconic species. He has photographed sailfish looking in coordinated teams, seen 39 species of sharks, together with nice whites, tiger sharks, hammerheads, and threshers and encountered the most important animal to ever stay, the blue whale.

“One of my first amazing encounters was watching a huge billfish. These are large billfish, kind of like marlin or swordfish, but they have this big dorsal fin that looks like a sail. One of the most beautiful fish in the ocean.”

Over the years, he has been accumulating some treasured recollections with sea creatures. One of essentially the most unforgettable of them, he mentioned, was in French Polynesia, the place he spent a month close to the island of Tubuai with a humpback whale mom and calf that returned day after day. Towards the top of their time collectively, the mom started to softly push her calf in the direction of the group of divers.

“I like to think she was saying, ‘These people are okay. You can trust them,’” he mentioned.

Having spent 1000’s of hours below water, worry is a uncommon emotion to Gross. He describes the ocean as calming, as soon as visibility opens up beneath the floor. The best hazard, in accordance with him, is when the climate out of the blue adjustments.

Nanaimo’s Shane Gross is a multi-award successful photojournalist, featured on the Wildlife Photographer of the Year presently being exhibited on the Royal BC Museum. (Courtesy of Shane Gross Facebook)

Looking again, Gross spoke a couple of second the place he feared for his life whereas underwater. He skilled an aggressive encounter with a small Caribbean reef shark, probably confused by a hook and wire chief lodged in its mouth throughout a stormy dive.

“This shark came at me. And I had my big camera… it bumped into the front of the camera, and I pushed it away, and it immediately turned back at the camera again. I pushed it away again, and it did that five, six, maybe eight times as I twirled in the water, bumping it off my camera.”

Beyond pictures, his experiences have formed a deeper message. He emphasizes that the ocean is complicated, and its animals deserve respect. He factors out that roughly half of the oxygen people breathe comes from the ocean and that numerous communities depend on it for meals, livelihoods and tradition.

Gross factors out that warming waters and ocean acidification are already disrupting ecosystems, making it more durable for shell-forming animals to outlive.

Gross is presently based mostly in Nanaimo, and Vancouver Island continues to play a defining function in his profession. That is the place he shot the award successful picture of a mass of western toad tadpoles swimming previous below the floor layer of lily pads.

Shane Gross’s The Swarm of Life {photograph} gained the grand title on the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competitors in 2014. The picture exhibits western toad (Anaxyrus boreas) tadpoles amongst lily pads in a lake on Vancouver Island. (Courtesy of Shane Gross Facebook)

“That image never would have happened if I wasn’t living here. Everything had to line up perfectly.”

Talking of future plans, he’s excited for the chance to discover Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia aboard a vessel named after oceanographer Sylvia Earle.

The journey will contain underwater pictures, and he hopes to come across penguins, seals, sea stars, and Antarctic ice formations.

In the meantime, the photographer encourages the general public to go to the exhibition whereas it’s in Victoria.

“If you read the stories behind the images, your mind will be blown. The more we know about wildlife, the better chance we have of treating this planet with the respect it deserves.”