Red Sea Results: Falmouth Students Celebrate Their Underwater Photography Exhibition
by Gina Goodman
Hello and welcome back to the Falmouth University corner of Scubaverse. If you’ve been keeping up with who we are and what we do, then welcome back. If this is all new, wild, and wonderful, then click here to find out more about underwater photography on the marine and natural history photography degree at Falmouth.
So, what happens at the ‘end’ of the underwater photography learning journey at Falmouth? Is it all over? Do the students drift off into the blue to find their own way? Not quite.
At Falmouth, we recognise the importance of diversifying our skills, and sometimes that means changing our environment. Whilst we are blessed with beautiful rocky reefs and kelp gardens in the UK, wide angle can still be a difficult skill to practice due to our changeable ocean conditions. We can certainly engage with wide angle practice here, even in poor conditions, but it’s much harder to understand what approaches are effective and why when we have to adapt our practice to suit the conditions on every dive.
Enter our Red Sea field trip.
Every year, after the students’ underwater modules are completed, we pack up our university dive store and migrate it (and our students) to our temporary Red Sea campus in Marsa Alam. The students have the opportunity to dive freely for two solid weeks, eating, sleeping, and breathing underwater photography in a beautifully supportive and collaborative environment.
The university team provides lectures, workshops, and image reviews across the whole trip to ensure students can maximise their skill building and creative output, and the results are truly remarkable. This year has been no different.
Upon return from the Red Sea, their hard work and creativity are realised at our final exhibition — a chance for the students to celebrate their own, and each other’s, progress across the trip, sharing the wonders of our underwater world with local audiences. The exhibition is also supported by our sponsors, Underwater Visions, Seaways Diving, Fourth Element, Finisterre, and Extreme UK, who generously donate their time and resources to supporting and awarding a selection of images across the exhibition.
There was exceptional work across the board from the entire cohort, making the awards process for this exhibition particularly taxing for our judges, but a decision was eventually reached and the results are as below:
- Rei Egawa – Macro (Underwater Visions)
- Sophie Hodson – Wide Angle (Fourth Element)
- Nicky Deeble – Atmosphere (Extreme UK)
- Ruby Cooper – Creative (Finisterre)
Photography aside, we also have an annual award known as the OTTA (Outstanding Teamwork and Teaching Award) that recognises exceptional teamwork, collaboration, support, and professionalism from a student across the trip. This year, the OTTA was awarded to Josh Connelly.
The exhibition is a remarkable tribute to a year-long journey in underwater photography. Many of our students have had no experience underwater with a camera when they begin with us, and only nine hours of in-water experience before landing in Marsa Alam. I’ll let the results speak for themselves, but it’s a truly proud moment for us all when we have the privilege of looking at the gallery walls and thinking, ‘Wow, I wish I’d been the one to take that image.’
Enjoy!
Click below for more details about Falmouth University’s Marine & Natural History Photography course:
https://www.falmouth.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/marine-natural-history-photography
Meet Gina Goodman and the rest of the team at Falmouth University shaping the next generation of underwater photographers here.
Header Image: Rei Egawa
