©Laurent Ballesta
Ballesta’s admiration for the Med does him a disservice though in raising the suggestion that this isn’t some intrepid explorer determined to venture far for his craft. There are very few, perhaps there are none, who can lay claim to have visited such a bewildering away of underwater destinations, from the Antarctic depths to the Amazon basin.
This is the man, after all, who took the deepest underwater photo in human history, who has recorded multiple dives in which he has uncovered new marine species, and who was the first man to take a photo of the unendingly impressive ‘living fossil fish’, the coelacanth – in its natural habitat.
“What I am looking for is ‘virgin places’ and animals which have never been seen before,” he nods. “So, the best – and maybe only – way to do this is to embark on really difficult dives. I have never stopped trying to learn new techniques – I want to always give myself new opportunities to go deeper, to stay underwater longer, to be more discreet, and to stay quiet and go unnoticed by the marine life for as long as possible, so that I can observe them in their natural habitat; that is a very important one.”
Of course, mechanical engineering has allowed us to see glimpses of what lies in even deeper parts of the world’s oceans. But few believe a non-sentient dive could ever conjure the breath-taking imagery Ballesta has built his career and life on, and this is an opinion shared when it comes to sharing his thoughts on what constitutes the perfect photo.
“Anywhere a crew diver can go will produce better results than the same dive with a robot or a submarine. This for me is not just some romantic idea, it is the fact the human eye and brain will make a better job of it than a machine.”
“At one point the photo starts in your imagination,” he explains. “So you imagine the perfect shot in your mind, the perfect landscape. I make the picture in my head, but sometimes what materialises can be luck, and that’s the beauty of pure exploration.
“You have to be patient in finding the right place, the right creature; you have to find the right light. So I think the perfect photo happens when you are able to link these sources of inspiration together. My own inspiration comes, on one side, from my imagination; then on the other from exploration, and really, it’s not always easy to marry them up. “However, when you do marry them up, you have what everybody wants – the perfect photo.”
Laurent’s new book ‘700 Sharks in the Dark’ is a stunning body of work, one half is an art photography collection, and the other half recounts the time the author and his adventurous Gombessa team spent studying the habits of sharks at Fakarava, in French Polynesia.
©Laurent Ballesta
©Laurent Ballesta ONBOARD | SPRING 2018 | 59
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