Photographing the shark of Darwin Island

Jonathan Bird · Issue 13, Jun/Jul 2003 · pp. 43–47

Products mentioned: Nikonos V, SB-105 strobe, Ektachrome 100

43 The first time I went to the Galapagos, I had pretty high expectations. Every diver has seen the ads and the photographs in magazines, read the stories and talked to people who have been there. The images of hundreds of hammerheads swimming overhead, whale sharks the size of school buses, colonies of playful seal lions and pods of dolphins all paint a picture of the Galapagos as a diver’s dream. Could the experience possibly live up to my expectations? No. In fact, it surpassed them by a mile. My first trip to the Galapagos was as a photographer documenting an expedition to put satellite tags on whale sharks and we spent the entire week on the Galapagos Aggressor up in the pristine underwater wilderness of Darwin Island, separated from the rest of the Galapagos by 150 miles. Darwin and its nearby sister island Wolf look a lot like the rest of the Galapagos but underwater, they have th…