While most people begin their mornings by putting on a suit to head to the office, Nanaimo based marine conservation photojournalist Shane Gross has a different routine to get to his job.
He wears a diving suit, oxygen tank and underwater camera gear to get ready for his job.
Nanaimo’s Shane Gross is a multi-award winning photojournalist, featured at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year currently being exhibited at the Royal BC Museum. (Courtesy of Shane Gross Facebook)
The work of Vancouver Island’s Gross is displayed at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, currently being exhibited at the Royal BC Museum. His work is titled Like an Eel Out of Water, and he is Canada’s only category winner for the 2025 competition year.
Speaking to Victoria News, Gross expressed how excited he is to be featured at the exhibition.
Gross grew up in Regina, Sask. and wanted to be a marine biologist, but ended up in business school. The turning point in his life was when he was backpacking through Australia after graduation in 2019. He came across a magazine featuring the winning image from the 2004 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition: two sharks exploding through a bait ball, mouths full of fish.
“That image made something click. I realized photography could be my way into the ocean,” he said.
From that moment, he pursued underwater photography with full commitment. Nearly a decade spent living and working in the Bahamas followed, where he refined his skills, developed a strong focus on storytelling, and became more involved in conservation work with non-profit organizations.
After the Covid 19 pandemic hit, he was forced to leave the Bahamas. He returned to Canada with a simple question: where is the best place in the country for an underwater photographer? The answer led him to Vancouver Island.
“It’s a rare and special place,” he said. “You can regularly see giant Pacific octopus, wolf eels, and kelp forests. That’s extraordinary.”
Over more than 15 years underwater, he has encountered some of the ocean’s most iconic species. He has photographed sailfish hunting in coordinated groups, seen 39 species of sharks, including great whites, tiger sharks, hammerheads, and threshers and encountered the largest animal to ever live, the blue whale.
“One of my first amazing encounters was watching a huge billfish. These are large billfish, kind of like marlin or swordfish, but they have this big dorsal fin that looks like a sail. One of the most beautiful fish in the ocean.”
Over the years, he has been collecting some precious memories with sea creatures. One of the most unforgettable of them, he said, was in French Polynesia, where he spent a month near the island of Tubuai with a humpback whale mother and calf that returned day after day. Towards the end of their time together, the mother began to gently push her calf towards the group of divers.
“I like to think she was saying, ‘These people are okay. You can trust them,’” he said.
Having spent thousands of hours under water, fear is a rare emotion to Gross. He describes the ocean as calming, once visibility opens up beneath the surface. The greatest danger, according to him, is when the weather suddenly changes.
Nanaimo’s Shane Gross is a multi-award winning photojournalist, featured at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year currently being exhibited at the Royal BC Museum. (Courtesy of Shane Gross Facebook)
Looking back, Gross spoke about a moment where he feared for his life while underwater. He experienced an aggressive encounter with a small Caribbean reef shark, likely stressed by a hook and wire leader lodged in its mouth during a stormy dive.
“This shark came at me. And I had my big camera… it bumped into the front of the camera, and I pushed it away, and it immediately turned back at the camera again. I pushed it away again, and it did that five, six, maybe eight times as I twirled in the water, bumping it off my camera.”
Beyond photography, his experiences have shaped a deeper message. He emphasizes that the ocean is complex, and its animals deserve respect. He points out that roughly half of the oxygen humans breathe comes from the ocean and that countless communities rely on it for food, livelihoods and culture.
Gross points out that warming waters and ocean acidification are already disrupting ecosystems, making it harder for shell-forming animals to survive.
Gross is currently based in Nanaimo, and Vancouver Island continues to play a defining role in his career. That is where he shot the award winning photo of a mass of western toad tadpoles swimming past under the surface layer of lily pads.
Shane Gross’s The Swarm of Life photograph won the grand title at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition in 2014. The photo shows western toad (Anaxyrus boreas) tadpoles among lily pads in a lake on Vancouver Island. (Courtesy of Shane Gross Facebook)
“That image never would have happened if I wasn’t living here. Everything had to line up perfectly.”
Talking of future plans, he is excited for the opportunity to explore Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia aboard a vessel named after oceanographer Sylvia Earle.
The trip will involve underwater photography, and he hopes to encounter penguins, seals, sea stars, and Antarctic ice formations.
In the meantime, the photographer encourages the public to visit the exhibition while it’s in Victoria.
“If you read the stories behind the images, your mind will be blown. The more we know about wildlife, the better chance we have of treating this planet with the respect it deserves.”