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Darryl Torckler spent a large part of this summer taking photos in the wave zone of beaches on the Hibiscus Coast and in the Mahurangi area, adding to the immense range of images taken in and around the sea for which he is best known. Darryl has won more than 100 major international photography awards, including the prestigious British Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition. His photographs feature in many books and magazines and he has also produced a dozen books on natural history, working with his wife Gillian. He spoke with Terry Moore about life above, and below, the water line.
I started photography early in life, and had a black and white Kodak box brownie camera. Right from the start my photography was linked with my love of the water. I was really interested in sailing and built model yachts. Once I sailed my model yacht from Torbay to Browns Bay between the reefs. It sailed really well, so I dug out my camera and took pictures of the boat, rowing after it in an 8ft tin dingy. I remember leaning right down to water level to take photos and something about that really connected with me. It made me determined to get a waterproof camera that I could take snorkelling and sailing so I bought a Nikonos II manual, which was the only waterproof camera available. I made a tripod from a beer crate and took it around at night taking pictures and started trying to snorkel and take photos. Some of the highest earning photos I have taken are the same sorts of subjects I was interested in back then in the early 1970s – people having fun in the water was a major theme. It wasn’t long before photography completely took over my life. I read everything I could on the subject and, in order to improve my underwater photographs, took up scuba diving when I was 17. Finding a job at the Hanimex Film Company was useful, because I consumed a lot of film and also staff could borrow single lens reflex cameras for personal use. I couldn’t think past planning the next dive.
One thing that enabled me to get an edge in underwater photography was that I built my own equipment, such as a waterproof housing that enabled me to shoot seven rolls of film in a dive – it’s a museum piece since the advent of digital photography, but at the time it helped me produce work that was unique. When you’re taking pictures of sharks, whales or dolphins you often get very short windows of opportunity and running out of film at a crucial time is immensely frustrating. I also built a remote camera that is lowered into the water on a pole – ideal for photographs of great white sharks and I designed and made a ‘port’ that enables me to take split-level images, above and below water simultaneously. These ports are not made commercially and I experimented before settling with my current system. I now have a lathe and milling machine in my workshop for making my own kit – I’m not as good as a real engineer, but I get by okay. The edge I have now is more about experience – I can go on a one-hour dive, even in poor visibility, and come back with some great pictures, because I know how to make the most of what’s there. I started making a living from photography in the early 1990s, and it was really the only career I was interested in. At times I’ve worked in retail and wholesale, for camera companies, and also tried plastics manufacturing when I thought I should get a trade in case photography didn’t work out.
Keeping up with the rapidly changing technology is vital in my business. At one time you bought a film camera body for around $2000 and it would last for 10 years, but a decent digital camera costs $6000 to 8000 and I would be lucky to get three years out of it before I have to upgrade, just to keep pace. What was great about film was the ‘happy accidents’ that could occur and the excitement of seeing images on a lightbox, or in a darkroom, for the first time. However, programmes such as PhotoShop have also opened up creative possibilities. I enjoy doing things such as stitching images together to create a super wide-angle or creating composite pictures, which I’ve done a few times for books such as The Real-size Guide to the NZ Rocky Shore. I find it hard to delete images, and only trash things that are out of focus or unusable, so have around 165,000 digital files stored in my database – it’s around three terabytes plus backup discs. Technology has also changed the way people view photos. Instead of photo albums, making books of images online is becoming popular with families. I imagine camera gear is going to get lighter and more compact. Diving gear, on the other hand, has got more high tech, but not lighter – if it ever does, it will help me keep diving until I’m much older.
I haven’t dived everywhere in NZ yet, but have been to the Kermadecs, the Three Kings and Stewart Island. The Sub-Antarctic Islands are on my wish list. I have dived all over the world, so it’s impossible to name a favourite location, but among the best are Goat Island Marine Reserve, the Poor Knights and Fiordland. The sheer volume of fish at the Poor Knights is impressive. A school of fish can be five metres or more wide and as you swim through the school, the fish move aside and then close up behind you which gives the effect of being swallowed up. Those sorts of densities are hard to beat. In nearly 40 years of diving, I have only been bitten once – by a yellow moray eel. I give talks in local schools and primary school children always like to hear how I was bitten and lots of green stuff came spurting out of my finger. I was down around 12m, and at that depth red light is absorbed by the sea, so blood looks green. I have swum with whales, and many different species of dolphins and have seen some gorgeous marine life – it’s a fascinating place to take pictures in. On a dive in Tonga, a humpbacked whale calf picked me up on is pectoral fluke and carried me along. Although it was a baby, it must have weighed a couple of ton. I was wondering where its mother was and it turned out she was having a rest down below and when she appeared, they swam off together.
I have lived in the rural Puhoi district since 1996. Originally, Gillian and I were looking for properties in a town, after living in Auckland, but we were tired of burglar alarms, dogs and noisy neighbourhoods. Gillian had family in Warkworth so we looked in that area. The house we eventually bought was a small bach surrounded by bush and waist-high grass. Living not far from the tunnels at Puhoi, we’ve seen summer traffic jams and unacceptable numbers of fatal accidents, so I’m looking forward to the extension of the motorway. The carbon footprint on the existing Puhoi to Wellsford road, which I call ‘the old goat track’, is much higher than it would be on a nice, straight, fuel-efficient road. The current highway is also putting a stranglehold on tourism and commerce further north. There is a lot of negativity about that road around where I live, but there have been too many deaths because the old road was not constructed for the volume of traffic that uses it. Although the cost of construction for the new motorway is high, there is a greater cost to the community in not building it.
When it is time to retire, I plan to still be diving and taking photographs, but I also want to get into working with clay. I have been doing little sculptural art pieces and jewellery and working with clay feels natural. I did a course at Hungry Creek and am looking into getting a kiln. The process involves a fantastic transformation that reminds me of how it feels to make a photograph. I suppose it’s not surprising that several of my pieces look like marine creatures.
