I was a skilled welder and could find work as I needed it, so I’d move from place to place around the Australian coast, work to save up some money, and then go off to the next place. The infrastructure is great for young people who don’t have much money but want to travel around and have a grand adventure. I decided to go to Australia at 23 years old and be a backpacker for a year. What was your inspiration for leaving home to move to the other side of the world? This moment was just before I captured my saltwater crocodile frame in February 2015 at Jardines de la Reina, Cuba. Michael Aw kindly shot this image of me with a giant split-shot dome port of my own creation. In 1999 he left England for Australia and began his endless summer. As they understood how passionately Matty was attracted to the sea, his parents would more frequently pack his inflatable surfboard and go, sometimes venturing on family holidays to the southwest coast of France or the Spanish seashore. Raised in central England, he wasn’t next door to the sea, but the country is small enough that weekends at the beach with his parents were possible. While 2014 was a transitional year for Matty, his life had been moving in this direction for decades. Later that year he traveled with Aw’s group to Cuba’s Jardines de la Reina, where he expanded his over/under portfolio with shots of the resident saltwater crocodiles.
He met Michael Aw of Ocean Geographic through their photo contest. Because of his successes in various competitions, he got an email from Nikon Australia offering him the coveted ambassador role, and Aquatica camera housings agreed to sponsor him. A portfolio of significant marine images with that as the lead was the beginning of what he calls his “lucky streak through hard work.” In 2014 he won the Australia Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year Award and swept first, second, and third places in the Ocean Geographic Pictures of the Year awards. His masterful photo was taken at dawn with the sun just breaking the horizon, a gorgeous blend of strobe and ambient light. Because the long tentacles dangling underwater are critical to the illustration, his idea was to shoot an over/under using a dome port on a camera housing to capture the above and below in a single frame. They aren’t very large - the floats rarely get larger than 6 inches - so to make it appear impressive in the photo, he had to work very close and use perspective distortion to his advantage. Matty had the idea of photographing them using a close-focus, wide-angle technique. Colonies of them sweep along Sydney, Australia’s beaches in summer. He was aware of the stinging cnidarians known as bluebottles ( Physalia utriculus)from a lifetime of surfing.
That’s what happened in 2014 after Matthew “Matty” Smith won a category in the London Natural History Museum’s prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award. SOMETIMES A SINGLE CLICK OF THE SHUTTER release can change a career trajectory.
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