OCEANOGRAPHIC (OM): FRED, I’M EXCITED TO LEARN ABOUT YOUR JOURNEY AND THE WORK YOU DO COMBINING FREEDIVING WITH CONSERVATION AND PHOTOGRAPHY. HOW AND WHEN DID YOU FIRST CONNECT WITH THE OCEAN?

FRED BUYLE: “It’s a funny story because I am from Belgium, which is not the ideal place to connect with the ocean; 60km of coast and a sand beach. You have to go ten miles offshore to have 20-metre deep water, and that water is murky. But my father was sailing a lot and from an early age we were travelling two or three months a year on the sailboat around Europe. I spent hours looking over the railing of the boat to see what was under the water; fascinated by underwater stories. By the age of four, I was totally obsessed with underwater exploration. At seven or eight I was snorkelling, and by the age of ten, I was freediving. That opened up a very different world for me. I was spearfishing every summer. At the beginning it was in the Atlantic Ocean, then at the age of eleven we moved to the Mediterranean, where the diving was much nicer than off the UK coast and around Denmark and Norway.”

OM: WERE YOU AN EARLY BLOOMER OR A FAST LEARNER?

FRED BUYLE: “I started scuba diving when I was 14 and was an instructor by the age of 18. At the same time, I started my first freediving school in Brussels. I was the first guy to teach freediving there. It was at this point I decided to go full-on into competitive freediving and I ended up competing in the sport for ten years, from 1994 to 2004.”

OM: WHEN DID THAT PASSION EVOLVE INTO UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE STYLE OF PHOTOGRAPHY THAT APPEARS TO HAVE BECOME YOUR SIGNATURE?

FRED BUYLE: “Two years before I stopped competing, I bought an underwater camera. The idea was just to take some memories of the trips we were doing, the competitions, the friends. But I got totally hooked. Before I stopped competing, I had magazines starting to buy pictures. Before me, all the pictures taken during these competitions were captured by scuba divers. I was the only freediver with this brand new perspective. The pictures worked very differently. As I was coming to the end of my freediving career, this unique approach to underwater photography took over. Freediving is not a sport where you can retire on your millions, you begin to think ‘what’s next?’ And for me, it was photography.”

OM: WOULD THIS HAVE BEEN THE SAME TIME AT WHICH YOUR PASSION FOR CONSERVATION AND MARINE SCIENCE BEGAN TO BLOSSOM, TOO?

FRED BUYLE: “I have always been into marine biology, science, and conservation since I was a kid. I think that came because my father’s best friend was a renowned geneticist. The conservation part? That came a bit later. Photographing freediving competitions was easy for me; I knew everyone in that field, so the athletes trusted me and allowed me to get close to them. I did this for a few years… before it started getting a bit boring.”

OM: BORING? HOW?

FRED BUYLE: “Well… basically it’s taking a picture of a guy going down a rope. And then up a rope. It’s not fun. But, it’s great to polish your skills, because you have to be fast, you have to take an action picture underwater, and you have to be ready. It’s a great way to discover the job. Then, usually, when you’re back on land you have to edit quickly to send it to the press, so you really need to be on the job. But, I decided to join my friends on a project that shone a light on sharks, and to really show that these sharks are not mindless killers, we wanted to create those pictures by freediving.

“That was 20 years ago. I think the first thing that caught the media’s imagination was the 2007 series I did with tiger sharks in South Africa. Later, I got a call from a friend who was an underwater cameraman involved in research in Colombia. He asked if I would be able to tag sharks while freediving. They were struggling to tag scalloped hammerheads. They had tried scuba and rebreathers, but it wasn’t working. I went there and within a week, we had tagged 30 sharks. From here I got really interested in marine biology. I started collaborating with more teams tagging sharks, but also documenting these missions. Since then, I’ve become more involved in the research, and here now in the Azores I am working with the university on noninvasive shark tagging.”