A lone diver's bubbles backlit against the hulk of the Giannis D wreck in the Egyptian Red Sea has taken top honours in DIVE Magazine's latest Big Shot underwater photography competition, which challenged entrants to photograph man-made objects beneath the waves.
The winning image, titled 'Exhale', came from David Bostock, an Oxfordshire-based wedding photographer who only got serious about shooting underwater in 2022. He captured the scene from a liveaboard trip, framing the wreck's fallen horizontal mast with a tiny diver hovering above it — a study in scale, rendered in moody monochrome on a Canon 5D Mark III with a 15mm fisheye. The prize is a Komodo liveaboard trip with Aggressor Adventures worth £3,325.
Second place went to Dan Shipp for 'Leaving Childhood Behind', a genuinely eerie shot of an abandoned child's buggy being slowly swallowed by plant life in Wraysbury Lake, just outside the M25. Shipp took it in 2016 before embarking on a decade of travelling that included a stint as underwater photographer at the Jean-Michel Cousteau Resort in Fiji; he now lives by the sea in Wales.
Third place went to Germany's Anastasia Shmuck for a crisply lit image of the Isonzo, an Italian water tanker torpedoed by HMS Safari off Sardinia in April 1943. She now lies on her starboard side at 40–56 metres, so Shmuck needed technical diving skills as well as compositional patience to get divers and torch beams lined up in the frame.
The highly commended entries read like a tour of the world's strangest artificial reefs. Nur Tucker photographed a clownfish anemone in Indonesia's Lembeh Strait with a discarded toothbrush parked in front of it (she removed it afterwards). Paul Eijkemans found a goby in Tulamben, Bali, laying eggs on rolled-up plastic. Cathy Holmes shot thriving coral restoration frames at Baros in the Maldives, Christian Horras composited a panorama of the sunken Lockheed Tristar in Aqaba, Jordan, and John Parker returned to the Salem Express in the Red Sea, where victims' belongings remain in place. JillAnne McCarty's image of old wives fish under Rapid Bay Jetty in South Australia now serves as a record of a jetty reef hit by a recent algal bloom.
For divers, the takeaway is inspiration and a next challenge: the final Big Shot of 2026 is now open for close-up underwater images — macro not required, just a subject 'in your face'. The winner gets a Northern Red Sea liveaboard worth $2,760. It's also a reminder that some of the most photogenic dive sites are neither coral nor creatures but things we dropped, sank or built: wrecks, jetties and even a sunken aeroplane, all colonised by marine life.
