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PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURENT BALLESTA, WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR
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By Rachael Bale, ANIMALS Executive Editor
It took 3,000 hours of trying to be in the right place at the right time. A brand-new protocol for spending an entire day 65 feet below the surface of the ocean. Time to develop the intuition to swim safely among hundreds of gray reef sharks without the protection of a cage.
And finally, photographer Laurent Ballesta made the photo he'd been trying to make for so long: a magical, otherworldly image of a pair of groupers, just mated, exiting a cloud of eggs and sperm in the Fakarava Atoll, part of French Polynesia, Natasha Daly writes. The mating is so rare and so fleeting that it happens only once a year, for about 30 minutes, around a full moon in July.
For this photo (above), Ballesta—a longtime National Geographic contributor—won the London Natural History Museum's prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. Ballesta has also photographed a shark feeding frenzy, ocean life deep beneath the Antarctic sea ice, and the floor of the Mediterranean. “Laurent brings classic narrative together with a cutting-edge embrace of technology,” says Kathy Moran, Nat Geo’s deputy director of photography. “Whether it is 28 days at sea or 24 hours underwater, he does whatever it takes to experience and document the natural world.”
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