Tim Gurney

As a child growing up with TV images of Jacques Cousteau and Hans and Lottie Hass (remember them?!), I’ve always been drawn to the sea and diving - encouraged by holidays with grandparents on the island of Jersey in the British Channel Islands.  I joined a British Sub-Aqua Club at the age of about 14 but a perforated ear drum doing a crazy swimming pool exercise put a halt to an early diving life.

A long career in the British Diplomatic Service had me, at one stage, living in New York in the 1990s. Curiously my morning walk to the Metro North train station took me past a PADI dive shop and into the Open Water course. And so diving began for real. A later move to London also, coincidentally, had me living around the corner from a PADI dive shop! Fate, eh? 

Foreign postings then became subject to the dive-ability test. Five years living in Bermuda led to discovering digital underwater photography, Wetpixel and becoming a PADI and BSAC instructor. My fate was sealed. 

After many overseas postings and then retirement, I spent a year running the diving at a resort in the Lembeh Straits and teaching underwater photography. However the siren call of wanting to Save The World intervened and I returned to land-locked Afghanistan to work on events there - and gave diving classes in my free time. Bit of a challenge. 

A Kodak digital camera and Ikelite housing started me on the road to photography ruin in the late-90s. But I’d always been a Nikon fan (even before I could afford one) and was led by Seaoptics in Australia down the Subal housing path with a Nikon E5000. I then journeyed through various Nikon Dxxx iterations, buying and selling Subal housings along the way, starting with the D100. I flirted with Nikon full-frame D800 and finally settled very happily in 2017 with a crop frame sensor D500. I’ll likely stay with that for some time to come.

I’m now a semi-retired consultant advising on responses to events that most people do not want to experience. Having just moved back to northern Europe from the Caribbean, I’m not diving as much as I’d like but I sell  through stock agencies and the occasional private sale a lot of the images that I take. Happily though I don't have to survive on those earnings.  

The underwater photography community is one of the most extraordinary group of people I’ve met: super generous with their knowledge, their time, their experience and advice. It’s a pleasure to be involved.