PT Hirschfield chats with up-and-coming underwater photographer Talia Greis
Photographs by Talia Greis
Having done over 800 dives (logging around 150- 180 dives a year), Ocean Geographic’s Emerging Photographer of the Year 2023 Talia Greis’ relationship with the ocean cannot be overstated. Without an ounce of melodrama, she asserts, ‘If I didn’t dive, I would die. I would fall in a heap. I don’t know who I would be or what I would do. It is who I am.’
At 18, Talia left Australia and lived in Israel for six years: ‘I studied a four-year Bachelor of Media and Communications, focused on film making and editing. I worked with directors as an editor, making music videos. But I wound up hating my job.’
‘I’m a creative person who needs a creative outlet to justify my existence. It’s very different when you have creative freedom to make something, as opposed to being a cog in a production wheel.
I did a gap year of travelling through Asia before returning to Australia. But coming back here didn’t feel like home anymore. I didn’t really know my place, who I was or what job to do. Diving with a camera gave me purpose again, a creative outlet.’
‘Living in Sydney and growing up near the ocean, I’d always surfed and always wanted to get into scuba diving. Being submerged gave me a sense of calm. I was a holiday diver for about three years before I visited Ningaloo with my mother.’
Talia took a GoPro 7 with her but found it wasn’t really able to do justice to capturing what she was seeing. So she purchased her first compact underwater camera rig after the Ningaloo trip.
She started entering underwater photography competition, winning the compact division in the Ocean Art competition in 2019 with an image of a rarely sighted yellow crested weedfish, camouflaged among kelp.
Upgrading to a more-advanced camera system, Talia continuing entering photography competitions. In 2022, she won the gold medal in the reFocus Awards Colour Contest and a silver medal in the World Nature Photography Awards.
In 2023, she won the Ocean Geographic portfolio for Emerging Photographer of the Year with three images: two taken in Mexico and one taken on the Yongala.
Most recently, she won the gold medal and $10,000 cash in the Landscape division of the prestigous Head On Photo Festival, the largest photography festival in Australia.
She also sold one of her images of a gobbleguts with eggs (which was also runner up for Nature TTL competition) to Bon Aire publications for a coffee table book in Europe.
While she’s dived in Raja Ampat, her favourite dive destination so far is the Maldives: ‘In 2021, I dived on a manta cleaning station. The guide said it wasn’t manta season, but we dropped down onto 12 mantas, including three pregnant females.
I thought one was going to give birth in front of us as it was contracting. Then a mating train started!’
Talia’s also dived in Bali, as well as Mexico in 2022, describing her week of cenote diving as ‘Mindblowing!’ She’s tech trained, but not cave trained: ‘I hope to go back next year and get properly cave trained. It would be pushing my limits in terms of what I’m mentally capable of.’
As a GUE trained diver, Talia confesses that more adventurous diving has expanded her comfort zone: ‘As well as being petrified of dive boats and flying, when I first started diving, I was prone to panic attacks underwater.
So I thought I would stick to Open Water, around 20m depth. Then I pushed it to 30m, then 45. Then I did a 60m trimix course. I wanted to know, how dark is it down there?
How much marine life is there? What’s it like waiting on a 30- or 40-minute deco stop? Now I’m thinking, let’s see where the limit is.’
Tech diving gave Talia a way to dive without the camera at a time when she found herself losing her sense of motivation, inspiration and creativity: ‘I think it’s good to sometimes step back and do something different that might spark creativity again or reignite that love for diving and the ocean.
That’s what tech diving does for me. Improving trim and buoyancy are so important to photography. Underwater photography and tech diving are very separate styles of diving, but they can compliment each other.’
In 2022, Talia teamed up with photographer Vanessa Torres Macho with a successful underwater photography exhibition in a cafe.
Together they’re also keen to support positive pathways for other female underwater image makers, providing greater platforms from which their work can be viewed.
Their joint endeavour ‘Liquid Lens’ hosts a website and competitions aimed to showcase and empower female photographers.
Having come full circle from her earlier profession as an editor in the world of film making, Talia is now starting to feel drawn back towards story telling with a purpose through the medium of video: ‘At one of my favourite dive sites, we’ve seen decapitated Port Jackson heads on the sand underwater.
We always used to see two eels that lived in one pylon. One of them was found dying on the pier with fishing line wrapped around its neck. We’ve seen octopuses with hooks in their tentacles.
I would love to tell a story one day that shows disturbing imagery. It’s an important way to tell a story – not just to showing the beauty of the ocean, but showing the sadness as well.’
Embracing the challenges of image making, Talia reflects that many of her most-memorable dives have not necessarily translated into successful image making, She notes that the joy is often in the experience, rather than in the ‘end product’: ‘Sometimes I don’t care that I don’t capture the image I’m after.
There’s value in the experience of just sitting and waiting for the moment to unfold. I once sat beneath a pier observing a seahorse for three hours, waiting for it to give birth as I could see contractions happening. I didn’t get the shot!’
Likewise, her most memorable moment underwater – a humpback whale passing unexpectedly overhead during a local shore dive from Sydney’s Shark Point in 2022 – did not result in any still images at all, though she celebrates the encounter as the pinnacle of her life underwater so far: ‘I didn’t take my camera that day, just a GoPro. If you go to Tonga, you expect that.
But to get that on a shore dive in Sydney! It puts a smile on my face every time I think of it!’ She also smiles at the thought of some day crossing diving in Antarctica off her bucket list.
You can discover more of Talia’s underwater imagery (including prints for sale) at www.taliagreisphotography.com
This article was originally published in Scuba Diver ANZ #65
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