Beneath Irish Seas: The journey to publishing a book of my underwater photography

Nigel Motyer · Issue 147, Nov/Dec 2025 · pp. 43–48

Products mentioned: Nikon Z8, Nikon D750, Nikon D850, Nauticam housing, Kraken KS160 strobes, Adobe Lightroom

They say everybody has one good book in them, I kept mine hidden for a long time; even I couldn’t see it. It was only one day when I opened Lightroom and it gave me a message that said my catalogue was too big to export that I began to wonder, a bit of a nag in the back of my mind, why do I take so many pictures, and what am I going to do with them ? Like most photographers, I had thought about producing a book over the years but I couldn’t quite see beyond the idea that it was just a part of me that wanted to see my pictures in a published collection, I didn’t see the story, I couldn’t hear the message, in short, I couldn’t ever quite see the point. So roll forward a few years and I was doing a story on basking shark aggregations off the west coast of Ireland and the journalist I was working with was looking at some images I had on my laptop. She couldn’t quite believe that Ireland’s ma…