Dive Ireland: Underwater Photography Seminar Speakers
At Dive Ireland 2016 we have an amazing line up of world renowned Underwater Photography speakers as well as some home grown talent!
Nigel Motyer
Nigel Motyer is a well-known teaching and speaking personality on the Irish underwater photography scene. He began diving in the early 80s and first picked up a camera shortly after that in 1987. Since then, it is his passion for the challenge of underwater photography that has kept up his interest in diving.
Nigel’s photography has been widely published around the world, including Subsea, Diver, Sport Diver, and Dive, as well as National Geographic Magazine. Nigel has travelled widely to a great many destinations over the last 25 years, but most recently he has focused on great shark destinations. Sharks have always been his passion despite being bitten by a rather over curious silky shark in the Pacific in 1995.
Nigel lives in Malahide, Co Dublin, with his wife, Sinead, and their two children, Hannah and Ben. A speaker at many a dive show, his level of photography knowledge – and his absolute passion for diving – will be clearly evident for all to see.
Steve Warren
Steve has worked extensively in the diving media since 1992. Book credits include technical editor of the UK Divers Source and contributing editor to Scuba Diving. He provided images, including cover shots, for Underwater Gibraltar. He has also provided consultancy services to other authors. He was technical and contributing editor of Dive International Magazine and designed consumer equipment testing and major safety projects for it and its successor, Dive. He has also written for Scuba World Magazine, Australian Freediving and Spearfishing News, Underwater Photography Magazine, Historical Diving Times, The Sea and Gibraltar Magazine. He now writes for Diver Magazine.
Steve has been a main speaker at a number of Diver Magazine’s Dive Shows. He has worked as a professional underwater cameraman on the BBC’s Marchioness – a Survivors Story and directed and filmed the diving sequences for seasons one, two and three of Channel Five’s Gibraltar – Britain in the Sun. He was a consultant to the Underwater Channel and is one of the founding team of Your Diving TV.
Brian Stone
Brian Stone is a very experienced diver and underwater photographer. Brian is a university lecturer and researcher working in the area of marine image analysis in Dublin City University. He is currently involved with MESTECH, the Marine & Environmental Sensing Hub (www.mestech.ie) which includes the Irish Marine Institute, the National Centre for Sensor Research (NCSR) and DCU.
Brian is also involved through his marine research with Insight, the Centre for Data Analytics, which is the largest research group in Ireland. The work dealt with in his project is part of the Smart Bay project, based in Galway Bay. This project is a test bed for new marine technologies, ranging from power generation to environmental science and marine biology. This technology is being developed alongside other marine sensing technologies for the purpose of gathering and analysing marine data in order to conduct research into changing marine environmental conditions, conservation and environmental surveying.
Damien McGuirk
Damien shot his first roll of film with an underwater camera in 1993, but didn’t embrace uw photography properly until 2006. Since then, he has been a voracious student of underwater photography with workshop trips to many parts of the world with such luminaries of the underwater photography world as Alex Mustard. His work has featured in Subsea and he has been successful on several occasions in having his images placed in An Taisce’s Clean Coast competition.
Nick Pfeiffer
Nick Pfeiffer is an environmental scientist, diver and underwater photographer. He currently works with MERC Environmental and is well known in Ireland for his land and underwater photography and for his commercial work in the fishery industry. Recently Nick was featured in the Irish Times with some of his stunning images of the blue sharks which can be found off Irish shores.
Stewie Andrews
Stewie Andrews has been diving for 28 years and has enjoyed rebreather diving for 12 of those. He is a recent convert to deep water photography. It started with two years trying to master steady GoPro video at depths down to 160m and progressed to two interesting years of still photography in depths ranging from 64 to 132 metres. Deep diving, in itself, is challenging – however, taking photographs is a great way to document the exploration and share the experience.
The challenges of Deep Water Photography are many. Years of preparation and expense are involved in building up your diving techniques and each dive brings the challenges of long boat journeys offshore – some as far as 75 miles out. The real fun starts with choosing cameras which are light sensitive enough and housings which can go deep enough. The only decisions left are how do you con a diver to model the scene, how do you light it and how many thousand ISOs can you tolerate?
Ivan Donoghue
Ivan Donoghue began diving with Wexford Sub Aqua Club in 1990. By 1996, he had purchased a second-hand Nikonos V underwater film camera. The advent of digital helped improve his photography, but he claims that working on the CFT underwater course with likeminded Irish shooters had the greatest benefit of all.
Ivan has published several articles for Subsea over the years. He has won the Scubadive West underwater competition and was placed in An Taisce’s “Love your coast” competition. None of this would be possible without the friends who have patiently modelled for him underwater, or waited for him to finally surface.
Ivan will happily dive in a puddle… but only if it’s deep enough to take a camera or at least half submerge to allow a split shot. There is nothing that makes him happier than seeing how underwater photography has flourished within CFT in recent years and how it is now one of the prime reasons that people begin or continue to dive.
Mike Orth
Mike Orth is the current President of CFT. His job description on Facebook lists “Irish Underwater Council’s Diving Evangelist”. Mike uses GoPro footage to create short videos promoting the club diving scene – with more footage above water than below. More technical knowhow than artistic skill, he hopes a few dive show attendees can use his hints, tips and advice to create their own advertisements for next dive season. Mike’s compilation of the South east dive rally won the award for best video at the Vincent O’Brien Memorial Competition in 2014.
Dr. Richard Thorn
Dr. Richard Thorn is a past President and National Diving Officer of CFT and has been diving for over 20 years. He has been taking land photographs for almost 50 years and for the last six, has transferred his interest to taking underwater photographs, with a particular interest in making images while snorkelling and breath hold diving. His photography is a companion activity to his academic research and travel writing, and his written work and images have been published in many magazines, including, in Ireland, Subsea and Outsider. He is currently studying photography at the Open College of the Arts in the UK.