Jellyfish of Walpole Bay

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Read the behind the scenes story – audio transcribed:

So it is no secret that I love underwater photography, and one of my favourite times of year is when we have a few still warm days, usually around June time and everything just starts to settle down in the sea. Because around Kent, because of our chalk base, we have very, very sediment, heavy water which is always very cloudy. And so it makes snorkelling here really difficult because you just have virtually zero visibility, even right in front of your face when you put your face in the water.

But there are those days where everything starts to settle, and it tends to coincide with when there is a peak in jellyfish arriving and I just absolutely love getting into the water and spending some time seeing what is down there and I’m obsessed with jellyfish. There’s no other way of putting it, but I just I think they’re incredibly fascinating. And, these, I met in Walpole Bay, these baby blue jellyfish. And they were just bobbing along there together and I love how this so much kind of chaos in the water with the seaweed and, there, there’s quite a lot of plankton bits and things floating around, and I just, I love how organic this image is, how it feels like it has texture that you kind of almost can feel like you’re there in the water.

But one of the things I love most about it is also being able to share what our nearest neighbours look like. You know, this is just a few metres from the sea. It’s probably in less than a metre of water, sorry a few metres from the shore rather, these are our neighbours right on our shoreline. And this is still part of our very immediate environment, as if, you know, park or woodlands were that we, we go to and can see, and so it’s just my joy to be able to use photography, to be able to share, what I see under the water and what is such an immediate part of, our local environment.