At home in a watery world

Describes catching and tagging sharks as a job that now he can only really do himself. "We can't farm it out to any of our students because of OH&S issues. It's like the old Space Cowboys movie where the old bastards are brought out of retirement." Gets fired up by the many environmental challenges he wants to tackle. The only thing that stops him is the weather.

- ALAN DEANS

Fact file
Richard Fitzpatrick

Emmy Award-winning cinematographer and marine biologist who specialises in sharks.
Age 52. Lives in Cairns. Married to Belinda.

In 2015, Richard Fitzpatrick worked with natural historian David Attenborough. It was a career highlight. “It’s amazing when you see your film for the first time, with his voice and an orchestra behind it,” he says. Fitzpatrick is globally acclaimed for the Barrier Reef nature films he shot for the BBC, National Geographic, Discovery Channel and others. He worked just once on location with the globally renowned naturalist, shooting a series about the Great Barrier Reef.

“What normally happens is, you’ve got your natural history crew and spend a year or two doing all the work,” he explains. “Then [Attenborough] comes in with a separate crew for a week or two, shoots all the links and he’s gone. You don’t get much contact time. But, during the writing [of the series], he was involved quite heavily. His correspondence went backwards and forwards about the sequences that needed to be shot, what stories needed to be told. That’s always cool.”

Fitzpatrick can boast plenty of highlights in his own right. He has won local and international cinematographic awards and penned a thrill-aminute book, Shark Tracker: Confessions of an Underwater Cameraman, which recalls hair-raising tales such as catching sharks with his bare hands. He doesn’t do much of that these days, although he was recently out on the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef where 38 sharks – tigers, bulls and hammerheads – were caught and tagged.