In 2004, Fred Buyle moved from a celebrated career in competitive freediving to underwater photography. He has since gone on to collaborate with a number of marine conservation organisations, using his freediving expertise to help with field work, and has been published in the likes of National Geographic, The New York Times and The Telegraph. Nine years ago, together with Fabrice Schnöller, he initiated the Darewin Project, which aims to develop tools to study the language of cetaceans. In Issue 10, his photography illustrates the story of one of their more recent expeditions.

Oceanographic Magazine (OM): When did you first connect with the ocean?

Fred Buyle (FB): When I was a little kid my parents always had a sailboat, so I was always sailing with them. They didn’t dive, but I always wanted to go underwater. That’s something that always attracted me. When I was seven or eight I could start snorkelling and exploring and that’s how the whole thing started.

OM: Why did you move from a career in freediving to one in photography?

FB: I stopped competitive freediving in 2004 simply because I’d done nine years of being a professional athlete. Back in the day we were lucky, I had sponsorship. I didn’t make a fortune but could make my living just by competing and with a few sponsors. Freediving is a very young sport. At that age I was building a personality and trying to understand how I really function. I think it was a good way to meet people – even though we were competitors we were all friends. Sometimes we would spend three months training together for a competition, we would be helping each other and then on the day we were competitors. It was a nice sport for that. But it’s a lot of work. Every year you know you’re going to train for nine months for one dive. At some point you’ve done it and it’s enough.

OM: Is freediving a key element of your work?

FB: Freediving is simply the most natural way to go underwater. I think you better understand the whole ecosystem when you freedive because you become a part of that environment, more so than when scuba or rebreather diving. You make less noise; you can cover more distance and you can spend more time in the water. Your dives are shorter, but you can spend all day in the water, covering a much wider area so I think it’s a very good way to understand how a particular area or ecosystem works. The animals are less afraid of you so it’s much easier to get close to them. Usually they get curious and they come to you to examine you. When you’re freediving, you can really hear that the ocean is not a silent world, far from it, which is another sensory experience. Also, I think freediving makes sense for me because it uses less resources – every scuba dive you fill a tank it uses 1.5kw of energy. It doesn’t sound like much but it’s a lot.

OM: Is it important to you that your work aids conservation in some way?

FB: Of course! It evolved towards that over the years. I was always interested in conservation, but it was a little later, after I stopped freediving competitively and really started focusing on the underwater photography that I moved into that world. In fact, I started photography just two years before I stopped competing in freediving and I never thought it would be a new career. When you start taking pictures you start looking for stories and marine scientists always have interesting stories. That’s how I got involved.

In 2005 I started taking pictures for a team of scientists in Colombia for the Malpelo Foundation. We were tagging hammerhead sharks to see the movement of the species in the Eastern Pacific and their movement between Malpelo, Galapagos and Cocos Island. The data from that study helped that site get assigned as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. I started to become more aware of the different problems the marine environment faces so I became more interested in these issues. I have been working in this field for 15 years now, and I can see how the new generation of marine biologists communicate more with each other and the general public. The new generation, they share everything and work together. It’s a good sign.