OCEANOGRAPHIC (OM): WHEN DID YOU FIRST CONNECT WITH THE OCEAN? HOW DID YOUR PASSION DEVELOP?

HENLEY SPIERS: “It was a bit of a slow burner. I grew up in the British countryside and didn’t have an immediate connection with the ocean. When I was 12 years old, I started scuba diving because my father had just been certified the year before. I have to say that it was driven more by my parents than it was me. I certainly loved snorkelling and that sense of discovery, but it took me some time to enjoy scuba diving in the same manner. When I started working at a marketing consultancy firm in London after my History degree, I started to scuba dive on holidays and the ocean became my happy place. On paper, things were good, but my stress levels were through the roof, and I was far from happy. I would daydream in my office of becoming a dive professional on a tropical island. One day I did just that. I handed in my notice, and I disappeared to the Philippines to become a dive professional.”

OM: WHEN DID PHOTOGRAPHY COME INTO PLAY?

HENLEY SPIERS: “I had no interest in photography for most of my life up until that point. When I was working as a dive instructor, I had a little compact camera to document some of the things we were doing in a super casual sense. I went to Lembeh in Indonesia on one of my holidays and that was the first place where I became more aware of photography because everyone there had a big camera rig and was really focused on diving for photography. I started to feel a bit out of place with my small compact camera and so I rented a more serious setup with a strobe. We took that down on on a few dives and it was a bit of a ‘wow’ moment in terms of the colours which were suddenly popping out and the sharpness of the images. That was the first moment where I thought that photography is pretty cool. I then invested in my own camera system and brought it to my next job, which was in the Caribbean on the island of St Lucia. That’s how my photographic journey really started.”

OM: WHAT IS THE MAIN THING THAT ELEVATED YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY TO A PROFESSIONAL LEVEL?

HENLEY SPIERS: “I think one of the main things was the transition from seeing photography as a complement to a dive to seeing it as the number one thing, thinking about how you can craft an image rather than just diving and taking a snapshot. Once you start adopting that mindset, the way that you dive completely changes. Today, if I were to enter the water without my camera, I would feel like I was going without my arm because it just feels like a part of me. The other thing that elevated my photography was when I started to really try and be different, original and unique. When you start off, you learn through other people’s images and influences, and hopefully at some stage you take all of these skills that you’ve learned and you put your own vision onto it. That’s what really drives me today – the creation of images which are new, images of subjects that people haven’t seen yet, or subjects in a way which people haven’t seen. I’m really driven by ‘wow’ imagery and images that are hard to walk away from.”

OM: WHEN DID YOU STOP WORKING AS A DIVE INSTRUCTOR TO EMBRACE BEING A FULL-TIME UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHER?

HENLEY SPIERS: “When Jade and I, my now wife and mother of our children, lived in St Lucia, I decided to follow my heart yet again. I’d made a controversial step once in my life already in terms of completely changing career and basically dropping everything. I’ve done it once to become a dive instructor. It had been a tricky decision, but one which I had never regretted. So, I already had this life philosophy of following my heart and my gut on the biggest decisions. I knew that the ocean was the place for me, but I knew that I needed to keep that passion. I found myself wanting to be in the water crafting images rather than teaching or guiding divers and that feeling just grew and grew. I had some – probably misguided at the time – sense that I could do that job professionally because I wasn’t really that good, honestly. But I had the belief from making this big decision before that things would work out. I knew I needed to trust in my heart and my gut and that’s when I made the switch.”