Photographer: Jean-Philippe Trenque



Equipment: Nikon D100 camera, 10.5mm full-frame fish-eye lens, 1GB Compact Flash card, Sea & Sea housing, natural light, f4.5 at 1/80th second.  



BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGE

Eighty-three thousand people cannot be wrong! This is an outstanding image. It is the one, which visitors to the BBC website voted as their favourite out of a shortlist from a total of 12,000 photographs. And it won 34-year old French-born Jean-Philippe 'J-P' Trenque, who now lives in London, the title of BBC News' photographer of the year. He also won the environmental section of the competition.

J-P also won the opportunity to undertake a photographic assignment of his choice to produce a portfolio of 12 pictures that will be published on the BBC website. He will receive a £400 contribution towards the cost of shooting the story.

'There were many outstanding images entered for the year-long competition,' says J-P, 'but I think this one stood out because it was different. I took the shot at Shark Reef in the northern Red Sea. I had gone there in June 2004 to photograph the enormous aggregation of Bohar snappers that gather to spawn there at that time of year.

'Like everyone else, I was concentrating on the spectacle. Then I saw this shoal of barracuda off to one side and slightly deeper. I slowly sank down to their depth and waited while they became accustomed to my presence. They were wheeling and swooping about in great waves and I realised that I could influence the shape of the shoal by the way I positioned myself in the water. In this way, I think you can interact with fish.

'I swam beneath them and, as my bubbles rose, the fish gathered into a ball. I wanted to capture the movement of the shoal rather than an individual fish, but most images similar to this one are marred by the diver's bubbles. Therefore, I moved off to one side and slightly above the shoal before I began shooting.'

J-P was working in natural light because he did not want bursts of light from a strobe to be reflecting off the silver scales. Afterwards he de-saturated the shot in Photoshop. 'I wanted to reduce the colour in picture so it would focus the mind on the shape of the shoal. I like working in a black-and-white format - it can make certain shots, like those of wrecks, more dramatic.'

J-P has been diving for some 25 years. When he was nine-years old he decided to imitate his father, who was a diver. He modified his Spacehopper so that he could use it as an air supply from which he breathed through the tube from an air pump.

'When my father saw the device, he thought he had better teach me properly and I started diving in a pool, first with a tank which was far too big and heavy for me, and then the sea when I was about 11 or 12. I was fascinated with what I saw on those early dives in the Mediterranean near Banyuls, on the south coast of France near the border with Spain.' By 1996 J-P had a camcorder and was making his own underwater films.

'I had lots of sequences but found it difficult to weave them into credible story lines so I switched to stills photography about three years ago. I bought a digital SLR (single-lens reflex) camera and, because I could even check the shot I had just taken while I was still underwater, I found it provided me with a quick learning curve.'

He certainly learned his new medium quickly, and his work was soon winning prizes in various competitions, including a third place in black-and-white prints at the Antibes world underwater images festival last year, for another image of schooling barracuda taken on the same dive. However, his BBC success is his best achievement so far. 'I want the project to be about the need to protect the marine environment, but as yet I haven't decided what particular issue I will focus on.'