In 2020, the image of a whale shark with more than 50 fish in its mouth taken by Evans Baudin in Baja California, Mexico, won the award for the best underwater photography of the Through Your Lens contest organized each year by Scuba Diving magazine.
Scuba Diving Magazine’s Through Your Lens 2021 Photo Contest is supported by Aggressor Adventures, Cressi and SeaLife Cameras. It presents four categories of images; wide angle, macro, behavior and compact camera. This year they have received more than 1,700 entries for their four categories.
This year’s highlights include impressive shots of shrimp that help clean moray eel teeth and a clever composition of divers under thick ice.
This year’s grand prize went to seasoned photographer and marine biologist Lorenzo Mittiga. His award-winning photographs were taken around his Caribbean hometown of Bonaire and offer a unique portrait of the curious and territorial queen angelfish ( Holacanthus ciliaris ).
“In this case, I was totally focused on getting a nice frontal portrait of a less common, more timid and faster queen angelfish, hiding intermittently behind a rock,” says Mittiga . “This French angel seemed to want to be the prima donna, and stole the scene.”
Chris Gug took first place in Behavior with his fabulous shot of an oxycephalic amphipod clinging to a coiled salpa; Miguel Ramírez’s Reunion Island showed a reef squid that obtained gold in the Compact Camera category; the top macro shot went to Giacomo Marchione for his luscious and colorful group of shrimp, and Viktor Lyagushkino combined the worlds above and below the ice into one brilliant wide-angle shot.
“I dreamed of showing the difference between the surface and the world under the ice in one go,” Lyagushkino said. “It was not an easy task. The difference in the amount of light below and on the ice was huge, and I wanted to include a diver and something at the bottom of the frame. “
Congratulations to all the winners!
