Hello, my name is Bridget Lawler and I shoot fish.
I have been fascinated by the underwater world since childhood, when I watched Jacques Cousteau and the crew of Calypso explore this alien and beautiful place. At age 10, I decided that I, too, would explore oceans with a tank strapped to my back and a friendly dolphin by my side.** When I informed my parents of these plans, they said no, and it’s too dangerous, and you’ll change your mind when you grow up, and why would anyone want to do that? Those of you who know me IRL know how well that went down.
Fast forward a LOT of years to 2011, when I got certified by my local dive shop in Minneapolis. At that time, I had no interest in schlepping a camera rig below the waves, any more than I did on the surface. I’m not a photographer by nature. Besides, I didn’t finally achieve my dream of learning to dive, only to look at the incredible underwater world through an LCD screen on the back of a camera. Call it Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the Photography Corollary: one can experience a thing or one can document a thing, but one cannot do both simultaneously.
Yet, as I witnessed firsthand the decline of coral reefs all over the world, the idea of documenting gained urgency. I bought my first underwater camera in 2019, and that led, eventually, to this website. My aim is simple: I want to share the remarkable beauty of our coral reefs and the extraordinary, diverse life they support. That life is at grave risk now, everywhere around the world, and documenting it has become my greatest passion.
The dream never faded, my mind never changed, and today I am lucky enough to be living it. Always, I’d rather be on a dive boat, somewhere in the wild blue.
**Of course there would be a friendly dolphin because, well, I was 10.
Here’s me cleaning and replanting coral as part of restoration work with the Cozumel Coral Reef Restoration Program in May, 2021.
On the left, during a Spotted Eagle Ray monitoring/ID dive with Cozumel Ocean Research in February, 2022.
And me… shooting not a fish