Matt Krumins - Simplifying Photography For Everyone

Today I’m joined by the incredibly talented Matt Krumins - a Melbourne-based professional photographer with over 15 years of experience across landscapes, wildlife, events, and underwater photography. 

A keen diver, he commenced his underwater journey over 2 decades ago and I’ve admired Matt’s work for several years, particularly his striking big animal imagery from South Africa and his captivating underwater shots from Tufi Resort - where I had the privilege of living for a year. 

Matt’s passion for nature and storytelling through imagery is unmistakable, and his journey back underwater is one I’ve been looking forward to. 

He was named an Olympus Underwater Ambassador back in 2016 and in 2022 took out the Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year award in the Monochrome category. 

Beyond the accolades, Matt is a passionate educator who believes photography should be fun, creative, and accessible to everyone. 

Get ready for an inspiring chat with one of the most down-to-earth talents in the field. Let’s dive right in!

Transcript

Matt Krumins (02:19.799)

I have been diving for... 22 years. I know you wouldn't believe it with this young youthful face, but I actually did my scuba certification at school, I think it was in like year nine or 10. They had one of the guys, I think he was like a maintenance guy or something like that, but he actually had his instructor for BSAC and decided that there was enough interest around within, I think it was in Sea Scouts or something like that. And they put on a course.

 and we did all the theory and the pool stuff at the school. And then we actually flew down to Flinders Island and camped on the beach to do all the ocean stuff. We sent a dinghy down there, like a tinny, and a shipping container with all the gear about six months in advance. Went down, camped on the beach, and did all the ocean dives. Yeah, camping for a week, which was pretty cool. Yeah, that was like a long, long time ago. And then a little bit of a break in diving for...

Matt (03:13.868)

That's awesome.

Matt Krumins (03:21.62)

three or four years. I didn't realize you could dive in Melbourne of course because you wouldn't really expect that would you? Like it doesn't really look like you should be able to. And then got back into it again when I was 18. So there's about a three or four year gap in there where yeah I disappeared, came back and yeah it's a very very intense period of diving in my life.

Matt (03:42.772)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. I think I saw a post of yours recently that you've decided to dust off the cobwebs and contemplate getting back underwater.

Matt Krumins (03:57.504)

Yeah, well, hopefully more than contemplate because I put the gear in for a service. It's funny. So the last few years, obviously, we have, you know, we've had the whole COVID experience and things like that. So that wiped things out. I had a daughter in that time. So she's only she's turning five next year or this year. And so a bit more time to get back to it. I've been doing a lot of like, you when we travel, I'll do a bit I'll do some free diving. was in Tonga last year.

know, WA the year before. We've been around and about, but yeah, time to dust off the Melbourne dive gear and jump back into the cold water, I think, yeah, revisit some of what feels like a long time ago now.

Matt (04:40.618)

Yeah, I bet. See, I've never jumped in at Melbourne yet, but I've got a couple of friends down there that I keep promising to eventually when I come down. But apparently the macro down there is just as, you know, it'll match Chowder Bay up here in Sydney.

Matt Krumins (04:55.948)

Yeah, I reckon that there's, I mean, if you compare the two, they're going to be, there's a lot of similarities, but a lot of differences as well. I haven't done a lot of diving around Sydney. I've been up around Nelson Bay, Swansea and Port Stephens a bit. Very, very similar in that, know, dive conditions can be all over the place. But when you do get a good day down here, we've got some pretty amazing reef life. The macro stuff is very good. We've probably just got more challenging conditions, I think. And so that makes it feel a little bit more burdensome sometimes.

Matt (05:08.62)

Hmm.

Matt (05:25.002)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (05:25.454)

But really when you strip back the fact that it is a bit more difficult, you've got a bit more gear on you and things like that, it's amazing what you find in these places where people just assume there's just sand or nothing. Under piers here, you've got weedy sea dragons all over the place at Flinders. You've got tons and tons of macro life on the inside of the bay as well.

But go out to the reefs and you've got incredibly large coral and sponge systems down there. So it's a pretty cool place to dive if you can get past the effort level that needs to go into it.

Matt (05:59.85)

Yeah, I think that was the one thing that surprised me when I first came to Australia, in particular Sydney. You because you assume, I was living in Thailand and Papua New Guinea, so we're toastie, board shorts and t-shirts every day. And come down to Sydney, think, it's not going to be much different to that. know, and then it's...

Matt Krumins (06:11.66)

Ha ha!

Matt Krumins (06:16.45)

It is funny though when you go up to the tropics and you see people like yourself who have been up there and you're going the water's know 29 degrees and they're still in like a seven mil wetsuit they're like oh it's freezing today. It blows my mind on a travel trip when you see that.

Matt (06:27.594)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I'm just having flashbacks now of hugging air compressors when I come up from a dive. 28 mil water. Crazy. Anyway, let's, let's backtrack it a little bit, Matty Because I mean, I've been meaning to chat to you for so long now. And I, know, I see the YouTube coming up online and see all these marvelous photos that you take and all this fantastic locations and the

Matt Krumins (06:36.162)

Ha ha, love it.

Yeah, that's it.

Matt (06:59.852)

and the courses and tuition that you do as well. And I think there's just so much to unpack there that I'm glad to at long last have you on the show so we can actually talk about it all.

Matt Krumins (07:12.524)

Always glad to be. He might want to clear the afternoon if we're to go that far back, but yeah.

Matt (07:16.012)

Fill your boots mate, I'm free until 7 o'clock tonight when I go for a curry.

Matt Krumins (07:20.898)

Love it. Love it. Yeah. Look, I have been diving for a really long time. It's funny though, the underwater thing has the reason for this, the renaissance of my underwater career in Melbourne. It's actually a funny story because speaking of, you know, different locations and that sort of stuff, I've actually spent the last sort of two months over that summer period. Things are, you know, usually a little bit quieter trying to take holidays. And

I've deleted, I think, close to 60,000 images out of my Lightroom catalog over the last couple of months. And it's just led me to this kind of entirely new world of like opening up all these old, I guess, like old memories of things that I've done. And diving is one of those things, especially with underwater photography, that I think it's really important to revisit all those old photos because it makes you realize that as time goes on, you know, you're really impressed, you're so happy with the results at the time.

But as time goes on and you improve and you find new techniques, and especially if you do more than just underwater photography, I sort of look back and go, geez, I was so happy with what I got, you know, 10 years ago. And I think I sort of almost lost interest in the local diving because I thought I'd kind of captured, you know, the best of the best. And I look back now and go, you're crazy. There's with the extra experience, the extra technologies in gear and editing and, and techniques that I've learned, I'm really excited to kind of.

almost reshoot the entire thing and start again and just implement all this new stuff that's come in, which is pretty exciting.

Matt (08:53.098)

Mate, you've literally just taken my thoughts out of my head from yesterday. You know, I'm planning different expeditions and whatnot. And one of them in particular is going back to Tufi Resort in Papua New Guinea, where I lived for almost a year. And yeah, it's fabulous. Yeah, I know you do. I've seen some of your photos, actually. There's a particular aerial shot that gets used all the time, I think.

Matt Krumins (09:07.114)

I know Toofy well.

Matt Krumins (09:15.37)

I imagine.

Matt (09:19.028)

Yeah, think I found myself sitting there last night thinking, geez, these photos look average. And I think of the, you know, like you say, the quality of equipment we've got now and the upskilling that you do yourselves over the over the years, because I'm seven years into it now. Photography, is. And I can't wait to get back there because it is just going to be starting. It's a brand new canvas and going again.

Matt Krumins (09:46.958)

Absolutely. I think also, you know, like with social media bombarding you constantly as well. I noticed in the last episode, I think with Todd, he was sort of saying that, you know, when you go to a place you get bombarded from that location, Tonga is one of those typical things where you go there or you even so much as say it near a computer and suddenly every Facebook post is of whales. But you sort of get bombarded so heavily at the time with whatever you're surrounded by that.

Matt (10:09.366)

Ha ha ha.

Matt Krumins (10:13.582)

I think sometimes you kind of lose sight of what's possible and what's right there in front of you. You give it, you're so mixed up with everyone else's stuff. You know, you give it a few months or even a few years and you look back at it very in an isolated way. You're not kind of comparing it to everyone else's or whatnot. And some, you find some amazing photos you didn't pick up in the first round, but equally some of the ones you thought were keepers, you start to realize that maybe you're mimicking what someone else was doing or a trend of the month or something. And, and I do think it's,

it's important to sort of, yeah, reflect back on those shots. And a big part of that for me is actually deleting all of the non-keeper shots. know, a lot of people keep everything and then kind of have an album for just their best stuff. I've been getting that rampage now, just killing everything that is not my absolute best. And I guess that's the challenge is if you are, you know, if you ever decide that actually I regret deleting that because I really want a shot of that place, it's...

Matt (10:52.598)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (11:10.328)

probably a good idea maybe to be thinking about booking a trip back there to capture it in a better way.

Matt (11:14.998)

Hell yes, hell yes. And I tell you what, going on about deleting stuff, my missus, she doesn't save them in file. She doesn't put them on external hard drives. She just keeps the SD cards. So we've got a stack of SD cards. And I keep trying to explain that at some point they're going to be obsolete and you're going to lose everything anyways. I don't care, I'll keep them.

Matt Krumins (11:16.536)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (11:26.807)

Okay.

Yeah, right.

Matt Krumins (11:33.934)

Like the old PHS tape sitting there with all those family memories on it. Yeah, look, you know what though? I guess if you leave it on an SD card long enough that it goes out of date and you haven't done anything with it, that's probably a sign from above that you didn't really need it in the first place.

Matt (11:38.644)

yes, yes.

Matt (11:52.803)

True that, true that. So, hey, tell me, when did you first pick up a camera and decide to take it underwater?

Matt Krumins (11:53.002)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (12:04.61)

funny story in a way. I've got my mum to thank for that. Thanks mum. So I said I did my dive course at school and then it kind of lapsed, you know, like I didn't do anything with it. was, yeah, it just kind of got put away. And when I turned 18 and finished school, which was unfortunately a long time ago now, I had a particularly

Matt (12:10.24)

Way to go,

Matt Krumins (12:32.94)

bad breakup with a girlfriend at the time. And it left me in that typical 18 year old, my God, what am I gonna do with my life kind of situation? And I remember at the time, I took some time away rather than going straight into uni, I went straight into the workforce thinking that I'll try some things out. And one of my mates were at uni and everyone was busy and my mum turned around and said, you just need to have a hobby, something to do like on the weekends that's not just going out and partying with friends. And so,

I said, don't, you know, not really sure what I'm interested in. You know, I love technology. love photography and cameras and stuff like that. I'd always been in video and stuff at that point. And even in my work, I was working in video production at the time. Anyway, she sent me this, article out of the newspaper one day that was basically about diving in Victoria. And I can't remember exactly what the article was about or anything, but it sort of showed some pretty cool stuff.

I'm sure looking back at the photos would be, you know, probably wouldn't be as inspired, but at the time it was like, well, that really exists. And, and I said, oh, that's all good and well, but there's nowhere to really, where do you start? And so she started texting me all these dive clubs, which, you know, in Victoria, unlike a lot of places in the world, our dive shops kind of act more like dive clubs that have shops in them. And so it was a real sort of social outlet potential and, know, something to do other than going out and kind of.

spending all of my hard earned working money going drinking with friends. And so, yeah, I jumped into one of the dive shops. It wasn't my thing. Went into a different one. Wasn't my thing. And, eventually found my place in a place called Academy of Scuba. I think at the time it was called Aquatic Adventures. And it turned into just the start of a huge journey, I guess. And from a photography perspective, when I signed up to do my open water course, which was kind of a conversion from BSAC across,

I realized that none of my mates knew what I was doing. They were all kind of like, you crazy? Why would you be doing your scuba course in Melbourne? It's freezing cold. There's nothing there. Like you're mad. Why don't we just go out on the weekend? All this stuff. And I'm probably painting them in a really bad light. They were all doing really intensive university degrees as well. So when they, played hard and worked hard, but yeah, I decided that, you know what? There's almost, I need to have a camera in my hand to take some photos.

Matt Krumins (14:48.686)

to validate the decision around why I'm doing it. You know, like, so I can actually bring it back and go, Hey guys, this is what I'm doing. I'm not just staring at pieces of seaweed on the ocean floor. There's actually all this cool stuff. And of course we didn't have GoPros back then. We didn't have action cameras back then. That was a whole distant thing. So I, I had one of those little MJU mini cameras. It was like a little Olympus eggy looking camera. And I think I had a little housing for it. And yeah, it kind of grew from there to be honest. It just, it turned into a bit of an addiction, I think.

Matt (14:58.186)

Ha ha ha.

Matt Krumins (15:18.678)

like diving usually does. over the years, I think, as I said, with my even currently, you you look back at the photos and you're, I can do better than that. I can do better than that. So it was, you know, camera upgrade after camera upgrade. And that was, that was kind of the start of it. So almost since my first kind of real entry into diving, I've had a camera probably on every single dive I've ever done outside of instructing, which is a lot.

Matt (15:40.652)

So you've, you've literally entered a very expensive sport and decided to do the camera equipment and purchasing all at the same time to make you even more penniless than what most scuba divers are.

Matt Krumins (15:52.898)

Well, if you want a really, really, really sad story, I've got a good one for you. This is going, you know, fast forward a few years, I was really into it. I'd been to Thailand to live in Koh Tao for six months to do instructor. Yeah. I was in 2009, 2010.

Matt (16:05.866)

No way! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Matt (16:15.37)

Where did, who did you, was it, it wasn't with Crystal or something like that, was it?

Matt Krumins (16:18.71)

It was with Crystal, yes. We've probably been on the same dive boat.

Matt (16:24.804)

mate, yeah, yeah, Matty Bolton was the course director at Crystal. Yeah, he's now, he's got his own company, Black Turtle. yeah, I lived on the island for like four years. Yeah.

Matt Krumins (16:27.438)

Yeah. Yep. there you go.

Oh, okay, you did better than me. got six months in and realized if I stay much longer, I'm probably just going to stay. I thought, no, it's probably time to move. need to need to move. But, but yeah, did that came back and I'd taken some photos and back in Victoria and I just sort of agreed with myself that I was going to upgrade my camera to the first interchangeable lens camera system that I could get. So this was, um,

Matt (16:41.561)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (17:02.318)

It's still relatively entry level, guess, compared to today. But it was a Panasonic Lumix GH2, I think. And I decided straight out, I was going to do it properly. I bought a Nauticam housing, bought the ports, bought all the accessories. I was like, I'm going to do it seriously. I'm going to do it. Bought it all, took it out for like three dives and had taken some really nice shots. once again, mum steps in with a text message going, hey, did you see this?

And there was an article in the paper again. And this one was actually advertising that Olympus was looking for an underwater ambassador for their housings. And I was like, well, I've got no chance, but what's the point? know, there was no entry fee or anything like that. Threw my photos in and then yeah, about three or four weeks later, I got the phone call saying that I'd been chosen to do this ambassadorship. And I was so excited until I realized that that meant that my brand new $15,000

Lumix GH2 in Nauticam housing was going to get put on the shelf and part of the prize was an entry-level Olympus pen camera. And so yeah, it was a bit of a kick in the guts, it started off another huge journey of where it's taken me. So yeah, as much as it pains me, I think I only sold that camera about two years ago or gave it away or something because it was getting on, but as much as it pains me, it was the start of really good things.

Matt (18:05.74)

Ha ha.

Matt (18:10.29)

dear me.

Matt (18:29.878)

Yeah, Play to you. And mum again, who'd thought finding that kind of details in a newspaper.

Matt Krumins (18:36.386)

Well, I was going, what's the only person who reads a newspaper these days? So, no, the,

Matt (18:39.724)

So you're up against a competition of one.

Matt Krumins (18:44.806)

Exactly, there's probably no one else entering. I'm wondering why is there no one else entering this competition? Yeah, no, so it's, yeah, she and look, she's an artist as well. So she's always got my creative side looked after. You know, she's always encouraging that side of things. So yeah, anytime those opportunities come up. Yeah, she's never too far away from the pulse on that stuff.

Matt (18:49.088)

Ha ha.

Matt (19:05.932)

How does it pan out with doing an ambassadorship? Because you hear about people getting on these roads, but you never really find out much detail about it. They seem to do it, and then all of a sudden, onto the next thing. And bear in mind, if you mess anything up, we can edit it out. It doesn't matter.

Matt Krumins (19:20.494)

Yeah, I'm

Matt Krumins (19:28.074)

No, no, no need to do that. I look, I'm, I'm, I like to keep my opinions close because, you know, I always respect that my opinions are only based on my experience. And that doesn't at all mean that it's the same as anyone else's experience. So I think that's an important thing to put in as a caveat. I think my experience with ambassadorships are that in general,

most people who have ambassadorships, I kind of question why in a way. I mean, the example I can give you, I I work with a lot of brands these days, not from an ambassador perspective, but I run a photography festival. And so all the major brands sponsor the festival. And so they're all up there, you know, have close relationships in with their teams.

And what I tend to find is that the reality is there's not a lot in it for most people except for the glory of saying, I'm an ambassador with that brand. You know, a lot of people would assume that as an ambassador, you get given all the gear and you get gifted everything and that you've got free rein and they pay for you to go traveling and all these things. And I think the reality is usually for most people, very different to that. You do get projects. still do pick up.

sponsored projects from brands, but not as an ambassador. So I did the Fuji GFX 100S II launch with the 500mm lens last year. We went to the Northern Territory and shot a campaign. So, and I've done those projects and they're really great. They're more sort of, I'll call them transactional projects, but the ones where it just becomes a relationship thing, I guess it gives you access to gear and stuff like that. But generally speaking, that's kind of where it stops. And depending on the brand, you know, there's not...

not always all the perks people think. It's almost like the, I kind of think like the influencer lifestyle. There's of course a lot of people out there who are making a good living out of doing it. But the vast majority of people make it look great whilst behind the scenes it's maybe not such a shiny story. And I kind of feel like ambassadorships maybe fall into that a little bit. Hence, I had to give up a far superior camera to shoot on an entry level camera as an example. It commits you to doing...

Matt (21:20.352)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (21:46.446)

experiences and not appearances, you know, like attending trade shows and things like that. And if you've got something to sell of your own or something in your brand that that helps, fantastic. But if I think it's a common misconception to think that these are all paid opportunities and you can live as an ambassador or something. So maybe some access to early gear and stuff. But yeah, I think in general, I feel like ambassadorships are a great way to maybe

Matt (22:06.39)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (22:14.412)

have some backing, make you look credible, but there's lots of ways to do that as well. yeah, being tied into a brand, I'm not sure is always the best option for people out there. Yeah, yeah. But as I said, that's my experience, maybe not the general experience either.

Matt (22:24.148)

Yeah, fair one. Fair one. Yeah.

Matt (22:32.182)

Yeah, yeah. And speaking of brands, you're a Nikon dude, aren't you?

Matt Krumins (22:36.782)

I was Nikon. I've actually been everyone. The only person I'm missing, Leica. I haven't done Leica yet. I'm currently on Sony. So I shoot a bit of Fuji for their projects. But I shoot predominantly on Sony. changed from Nikon in 2021. And before that, was Olympus. Before that, was Canon. Before that, was, I'm sorry, Lumix. And then it was Canon. So yeah, I kind of get around, to be honest.

No, that's it. That's it. That's it.

Matt (23:06.828)

Nothing wrong with that. Go where you need to go. I having the conversation, was it yesterday? Yesterday, day before, something like that. And it was about brands, that usual conversation, which brand is better for which. I wonder, because I look at Sony and think, bugger me, they're really, really good. But then you look at Nikon and...

Matt Krumins (23:23.746)

Yep.

Matt (23:34.838)

They're really, really good. And I shoot on Canon and I think it's really, really good. And I think it's the web of trying to weed out, you know, which one's better than which when you add in all the components that get put onto the camera as well to make these images and this video footage complete. I don't think you can actually answer the question as to which one's better than which. Is that fair to say?

Matt Krumins (23:38.19)

Yes.

Matt Krumins (23:59.986)

No, I actually, reckon you're you're bang on the money. I don't think there is a better brand. I think they've all got strong points. And so maybe for an individual, you might find that one brand is better than another. You know, like, I'll give you an example at the moment. I'm I haven't had that kind of, you know, post evening beverage contemplation session around whether I switch out of Sony again, only three years later.

Matt (24:25.804)

Ha

Matt Krumins (24:26.05)

Because I look at it and go Nikon's got a 400 millimeter F 2.8 lens with a built in 1.4 teleconverter for wildlife. Now that's kind of my dream lens. I used to have the Nikon 400, didn't have a teleconverter built in and it was good, but I didn't like that it didn't have a teleconverter. The new one's got a teleconverter. Sony hasn't come out with anything yet that's in that realm. And so arguably if I had, you know, complete free reign from right now, I'd probably going and buying myself a Z8 or a Z9 with that lens and adapting everything else around it.

I think equally if you are a wide angle shooter, you know, from what I understand, although it may have changed recently, but I know Canon's got a lot more options in really ultra wide rectilinear lenses, for instance. You know, they've got the 10 to 20 or something like that, which no other brand really, they don't have anything in that range. You can get third party lenses, of course, but so if you loved your ultra wides or you your fish eye stuff that might direct your decision making a little bit, but I really do think at end of the day,

It's like a car. It kind of comes down to how much money you spend. If you spend $10,000 on a camera body, odds are you're to get really similar specs across that to another brand, maybe a few perks here and there. But it's probably going to the same as the other $10,000 camera. You spend $2,000 and odds are it's probably going to be comparable across the range. And maybe that's the mistake sometimes we make is that someone would advocate, my God, Sony's the best, it's the best. And that's because they're shooting on the highest end version of that camera.

but they might be talking to someone else and comparing it against something that's, you know, mid range or even a high mid range. And so it's not really apples and apples. When you actually line up against each other, they are really similar. I think maybe the thing that does sway me to Sony a little bit these days is that their prime lens lineup is incredibly small compared to their competitors, incredibly lightweight. And I think they're also a lot cheaper.

on a lens for lens basis and they're sharper in a lot of cases. So you can buy a Sony full lineup of all their, you know, normal primes before you go to super Tellys. You could probably buy for less than 10 grand. You've got every single one of their primes, you know, up to 135 millimeters. So you can't do that with some of the other brands. And so that that's a decision as well. If you, if you're that kind of a shooter, but yeah, they've all got pros and cons, I guess.

Matt (26:24.076)

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt (26:50.25)

Yeah, yeah.

Matt Krumins (26:51.566)

You know, it's probably the one that really has a discrepancy for me is underwater housing is where the market really separates. And I think that's a game changer in a lot of ways, depending on what you shoot. It doesn't matter what camera you put in it, the housing you have is everything when you're underwater, in my opinion.

Matt (27:07.562)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd love to have a Nautigam housing, but my camera's too old for it. Well, I say too old, I bought it and a year later they stopped making it. Thank you very much Canon. M6 Mark II, mirrorless. Yeah. I thought it would be ideal for diving and traveling because they're lightweight and that. So.

Matt Krumins (27:14.466)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (27:18.884)

No way! What are you on?

full on. And then I...

Matt Krumins (27:29.134)

No, that's the key with cameras and underwater housings. You've got to commit. commit five years ahead of where you think you should be. And that's where you make the decisions. So, yeah.

Matt (27:38.902)

Yeah.

Yeah, and that's what I did with this one really. And at least I could find a, I've got an Ikelite housing for it and it's done the job. you know, another couple of years with that one and then we'll move on. What's, all right. So we could go down a real rabbit hole of photography here and spend hours on it, couldn't we? And I'll probably learn a hell of a lot for free as well, which is good. Yeah.

Matt Krumins (27:47.372)

Yeah, nice.

Lovely, lovely.

Matt Krumins (28:04.606)

Go for it. Use the experience, hey? I'll try and remember these things from underwater.

Matt (28:11.468)

Well, I'd actually like to know what's your favourite style of photography? What's the thing that I know when you get a camera in your hand, probably get excited straight away, but what's the one that really gets you going?

Matt Krumins (28:24.622)

Yeah, I reckon it's really easy for me. I absolutely love monochrome underwater photography. That's like has to be the most driving creative force in my world. Not with every subject, of course, there's some things that don't translate overly well, but I've got my little cuttlefish in the back there. No, it's not going to focus. But yeah, look, it's

Matt (28:46.412)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (28:52.526)

To me, monochrome underwater is a really interesting one. I actually will do a shameless brag, but I did take out the Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of Year in monochrome in 2022 with a monochrome underwater shot up in Port Stephens. Oh no, Fish Rock Cave. But yeah, but I don't know. think that that's like a, this is a hangover from when I first got into it, I think, because I always,

Matt (29:11.35)

Nice.

Matt Krumins (29:21.528)

took these shots and they're very, colorful underwater. And what I realized really quickly through my wife was that, know, bright colors on walls aren't always appropriate. And so I always wanted to try and make things look aesthetically pleasing and interesting to people who weren't just divers, you know, a beautiful reef scene is incredible for most people, but when it comes to putting it on a wall or wanting a print version of that, it takes a pretty niche subject to convert that color.

into something that works on a wall in most people's houses or locations. so I thought monochrome was a really interesting way of making wildlife photography appealing to the masses because you can play more on the texture and the shapes and silhouettes and that kind of interest. And it's not immediately obvious necessarily what you're even looking at it. You can kind of walk past it and it's just a feature on the wall. Whereas a color version really grabs your attention and that's great, but it doesn't always fit into the environment.

Matt (29:52.673)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (30:20.416)

So I kind of went down that monochrome path a bit, you know, quite a while back. I think that works best generally speaking with sort of more large pelagics. So, you know, you're talking whales, sharks, mantas, anything in that realm. But I also really love some really minimalistic coral reef stuff where you've just got, you know, you use the black and white contrast sliders where you can sort of mix the color tones to actually highlight sections of the reef just through the color contrast in black and white.

And that can make a really, really interesting shot where you can almost completely manipulate the lighting just through that color selection, which is pretty cool. Yeah. Have you done any black and white? Am I alone in the black and white field or is...

Matt (30:58.518)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you're...

Matt (31:04.99)

No, no. Straight away, I'm thinking Don Silcock had a little play around with it a couple of years ago. And Talia, Talia Grease, she did a, there's one photo in particular I can remember because I think it's absolutely fabulous. And it was a, I think it was a bottle nose or maybe a spinner dolphin, but it's literally just a black and white. And it just looks so eye catching. It's marvelous. So when you...

Matt Krumins (31:23.395)

lovely.

Matt Krumins (31:31.169)

Yeah. I think the other thing with the black and white thing, actually, now I think about it, I've got some open in the background on my browser, just reminding me of that, you know, that passion, but it's, I think it also helps to disguise conditions. That's probably one other thing I'll throw in there.

It's a really, really easy way to disguise tricky conditions. If you have bit of, not backscatter, but you've got a bit of stuff in the water, yeah, when you've got color there, it's not as forgiving. And so I think it helps sometimes to clean things up a bit. That's exactly right.

Matt (31:47.264)

Yeah.

Matt (32:00.064)

Yeah.

Get rid of the whale snot. So when you go, when you dive in, you're obviously purposely set up on monochrome. If you have a shot in the way I'm going here is I'm talking about post editing now because the amount of post edit production that you can do is just, it blows my mind how you can have a full color image and make it black and white and blah, blah, blah, blah. Is it?

a significant difference playing around with doing a color shot and then making it black and white to try and get the same kind of result.

Matt Krumins (32:40.918)

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely similarities across it. I tend to shoot black and white a lot of the time, regardless, to be honest.

Matt (32:48.172)

Hmm.

Matt Krumins (32:49.218)

You know, the way I always look at photography and this goes with land photography as well is that you can't control color on the spot. You know, you can't change the color of the day. You can't change the white balance of the environment around you. And so if there's, or nor can you, can you actually change the color of objects in your scene? So I don't know if you've ever had that situation. You're photographing something on a reef. And then of course, there's this really shiny, colorful something in the background. And of course it's a huge distraction in the shot. You can't necessarily control that.

And so I kind of take the philosophy that I can't control color, but I can control the light. You know, you can control your exposure. You can control the direction you shoot to get different contrast. You can control the way you might have shapes and contrast into play with each other. And so I find that actually shooting in black and white most of the time is really helpful because that is something I can control the tone. But what I can't control is the color. I can manipulate that later on in post, you know, if I don't like that thing in the background.

Matt (33:25.536)

Hmm.

Matt Krumins (33:46.028)

you can mask it to pull the saturation down or you can remove it altogether. But if you focus too much on the color, sometimes that means you go for a dive and you decide, this day is just not worth shooting because the water is a bit green, such and such isn't working and it can be disheartening. Whereas you go to black and white and suddenly it sort of strips out this layer of uncontrollable variable. And I think that...

I don't know, it feels better doing it. And I think it makes you think harder about the contrast in your shots too. Like I think you genuinely look at your shot and start to go, hold on a second, of course this subject's not going to stand out. The background's brighter than it. And so there's a, the contrast needs to be flipped. If I move to here, then the subject's going to be brighter against the dark background. That'll pop out. So you, yeah, it makes you think a bit harder. Of course you do get a lot more production.

Matt (34:16.363)

Hmm.

Matt (34:32.705)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (34:36.62)

or more production options in Lightroom as well when converting in Lightroom or whatever program you use to. You've got the color sliders, you've got even things like the picture profiles now that are built in, the black and white picture profiles are really, really useful. And I think as long as you kind of stick to a theme and you try and keep your edits consistent enough that you develop a bit of a style, I think it works really, really well. Yeah, definitely.

Matt (34:48.812)

Yeah

Matt (35:01.056)

Yeah, yeah. I'm tempted to set mine on black and white next time we go down to Shadow Bay and give it a whirl.

Matt Krumins (35:06.134)

Yeah, it's not a idea. Like it does make you see things a lot differently. And often you'll get, you know, they'll convert to color and you go, what was I thinking? This photo is really rubbish because it works in black and white, but not color. But I generally do think that, you know, even was going to work in the first place, it'll work in both. But more often than not, if something's only going to work in one version, it's going to work in black and white rather than color. Yeah.

Matt (35:09.996)

you

Matt (35:23.818)

Yeah, yeah.

Matt (35:29.46)

Yeah, yeah. I'll just say we've got some black anglerfish down at Chowder Bay and they're a pain in the ass to try and actually get any kind of detail on them because they're so black, you know. It might work in black and white actually. I'll give that a go. Yeah.

Matt Krumins (35:40.663)

Yeah.

it make you think about it differently. You can't use the color to contrast it. So yeah, definitely worth it. I think the only thing you really got to watch out for, I guess, if you want to look at a technical side is that if you put something like a digital red filter into your black and white, so, know, in your pictures, styles and your Canon,

Matt (35:48.332)

Yeah.

Matt (36:01.196)

Mm-hmm.

Matt Krumins (36:02.082)

and then you can hit the info button and sort of adjust what monochrome is. So you've got contrast sliders, sharpness sliders and things like that. There's an option there to have a digital red filter. And whilst that often makes things look better, because it adds extra contrast, it makes the blues almost go pitch black. It'll also screw up your histogram to represent the monochrome image. And so when you go to color, you may find that you've blown out or crushed.

Matt (36:24.043)

Thank

Matt Krumins (36:27.884)

detail that was going to be there. So it takes a bit of, I won't say practice, but trial and error, I guess, to see the resulting camera. check that histogram and then you look at the color version on your computer and try and kind of suss out, okay, cool. If I'm shooting these into blue water and I'm using a digital red filter, it's crushing the blues to black. I need to make sure that I'm, yeah, I'm under exposing or overexposing to kind of compensate for that a little bit. Yeah.

Matt (36:31.116)

you

Matt (36:48.758)

Ha ha ha.

Matt (36:54.828)

Yeah. So when you get those messages with Matt, have I done wrong here? And I'll give you a blown out photo.

Matt Krumins (37:03.414)

It's basically, oh, you know, it's funny, like, this is the experimental part, isn't it? This is the fun bit. I think this is the part that I miss in photography sometimes is the playing with it. I think, you know, we can get so bogged down in like a what we're supposed to do that you don't just muck around and sometimes mucking around lets you find these little quirks that make you makes you work different. You know, I'm always searching for what can make my work differentiate from the next person because

Matt (37:21.91)

Hmm.

Matt Krumins (37:30.54)

As technology gets better, mean, we've got so many amazing photographers now, it's pretty hard to stand out or to do something that others aren't doing, I guess. And that's where the novelty in it, you know?

Matt (37:39.264)

Yeah.

There's a lot of points in shoot that work really, really well. And sticking with the macro, in the macro theme, the TG range, wow.

Matt Krumins (37:44.812)

Yeah, absolutely. even Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. And what about like lighting these days? I've been researching new strobes for no real reason because my strobes are perfectly fine. you know, the old typical getting back into it, I better treat myself. And like what's available now compared to what was available, you know, even a few years ago. It's insane, like

And the price point that you can get some really decent gear at is amazing. I was looking even the other day at what are those macro tubes with the create the circular effect.

Matt (38:20.748)

Is it something from Backscatter?

Matt Krumins (38:21.966)

can't even remember what they're called because they've been looking at so many devices. Yeah, something like that. And it's kind of like a tube that obviously has a reflective surface inside. So when you shoot through the tube, it kind of creates like a ring of light around your subject, but it's a mirror ring of your subject. So you get the color profile of your subject. But there's all these like little novelties here you can add that just, it's pretty cool what you can play with.

Matt (38:36.181)

wow.

Matt (38:41.366)

Ha

Matt (38:46.22)

I got a retrosnoot for one of my strobes for Christmas. So I'm, yeah, yeah. And I'm over the moon. And you hit on the spot earlier on. You get a new piece of equipment and all of sudden you're back to that school kid that can't tie his shoes and scratching your head and a thousand wasted photos. But eventually something just clicks and it all comes together. So I'm stunned.

Matt Krumins (38:52.79)

Lovely. Beautiful face of you.

Matt Krumins (39:14.158)

Well, especially a snoot to keep a snoot in one piece for over, you know, 10 dives. that's impressive. Cause most people get so pissed off with them that after dive two, they're being snapped in half and thrown in the bin. yeah, I've had many, many swearing arguments that have Blenny trying to use my retro, snoot to, to, light it. But, yeah, my gosh, what a, what a, what an incredibly cool, but bloody difficult piece of equipment.

Matt (39:16.075)

Yeah.

Matt (39:22.72)

Ha ha ha ha.

hahahaha

Matt (39:43.136)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd like to say I'm looking forward to getting there, but I'm enjoying the journey at the minute, so it's all good. What stripes did it go for?

Matt Krumins (39:49.421)

Yeah, lovely.

Look, I think my ones are still the old CNC YSD 2s from a while back. I've got no real reason to upgrade them. I just, I'm a quality person. I don't have a lot of time to do my own thing in photography these days with work, photography and, you know, trips and courses and all that sort of stuff. And so when I do get out there to shoot, I treat that time pretty preciously. So I'm a bit of a quality snob.

Matt (39:56.853)

Okay.

Matt Krumins (40:21.006)

when it comes to gear and knowing that I guess it's a bad habit to get into, but it kind of comes back to what I was saying earlier about walking away from underwater for a while in Victoria. And that was that I sort of felt like I'd had the shot. And so every time I went down to the peninsula and jumped in the water, if that shot that I was taking right then didn't outperform the, when I say outperform, it wasn't a better shot than the one I've already got, there was no point in keeping it because I've already got a great shot of that.

And it's a really probably a very negative loop to get into. but I sometimes look at it and go, well, I've would different equipment allow me to treat that differently? Would I would, would it genuinely solve a problem? Would it really improve things? And I look at the size of strobes these days. One thing's really exciting for me that wasn't available. when I was making my last stroke purchase was the high speed sync capabilities of these underwater strobes, you know, which for those who are listening, who haven't played or heard of this before, but

HSS or high-speed sync is basically where you can on a interchangeable lens camera exceed the sync speed limit. So a lot of your cameras, if you have a, not a point and shoot, but an interchangeable lens camera, you'll only be able to shoot at say one, you know, think the A1 has got 1 400th of a second. The, but yeah, most cameras have a much lower sync speed and some of the older units are down at one 200th of a second. It makes it almost impossible to shoot up in towards sun balls without

crazy, crazy closed apertures and things like that, which has other issues. And so there's that aspect of it. You can also get completely pitch black backgrounds in daylight conditions, which is really exciting, especially for snoot photography. I'm not having to go out and really muck around in low light conditions. So that really excited me. And that kind of got me thinking like what's out there now. And that's a total minefield. My God, like you want to get confused and realize that the world, the sky's the limit.

Matt (42:13.484)

the

Matt Krumins (42:18.286)

Um, you know, some of the strobes I was looking at the other day, I think they were like, you know, $4,000 Australian dollars a piece or something stupid. Um, which is nuts, but, but you get what you pay for in a lot of those instances. And it makes me kind of curious. Well, if you get what you pay for, like, well, I want to know what I'm paying for. Exactly right. You know, you don't know until you don't know until you know. So, um, yeah, that, that, that, that intrigued me a little bit. Um, yeah, I do bring myself back down to earth though and go, on a second. It's a flash.

Matt (42:33.098)

I want to pay for it.

Matt (42:42.71)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (42:48.374)

Let's maybe do a few dives first and let's see where we're at with our current gear rather than upgrading. I think my Sony A1 has only, with its Nauticam housing and all its bells and whistles has only been in the water for probably 30 dives or something like that. So yeah, probably need to spend a bit more time with it before I start treating myself to too many toys.

Matt (43:01.289)

Okay.

Matt (43:08.202)

Yeah, yeah. And you've also got to put it on balance that the boss of the house has to give it the thumbs up on spending the money on it as well.

Matt Krumins (43:15.19)

Well, it's a work expense. One of the benefits of being a photographer, know, everything's, yeah, everything in life is a work expense really, isn't it?

Matt (43:25.984)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I use that one all the time for planning trips. Any dive equipment, any travel.

Matt Krumins (43:30.37)

Yeah.

Oh, I tell you what, that is something I really miss. Actually, we're getting back into a bit of travel this year. And you know, not that I haven't traveled with them. I've done a lot of travel, but usually for work, not my own photography. And yeah, I tell you what, I do miss a good dive trip. It's, there's nothing like rocking up to a place knowing you've got five or six days of, four to five dives a day. And that's all you're doing. You're just in the water and you know, always day one, you're kind of like, well, what the hell's going wrong? Nothing's working.

And then by day two, you realize, that's because this setting is wrong and that thing's wrong. And I haven't done this and I've moved the strobe here and that happened and this happened. And just, you know, because you've got so much diving to do, you just fall into that groove and there's just something so, I don't know, cathartic about being underwater, just doing your thing, knowing there's nothing else in the world that needs to happen right then. Yeah.

Matt (44:20.588)

Yeah, yeah. I love it. mean, for me, diving is, it's my happy place without a shadow of a doubt, but then you put a camera in my hand and it's the ultimate happy place for me. You know, I've got a, I've got a mind that's going a million miles an hour, 24 seven. It's like a fucking bag of frogs on acid. And as soon as I get in the water, they all shut up for as long as I'm under the water, you know? And I think it's just that, relaxation point and then having the focus of the camera and

Matt Krumins (44:42.998)

Yeah.

Matt (44:49.77)

and that enjoyment of trying to capture a nice shot. That's beautiful. Best place in the world.

Matt Krumins (44:52.814)

Yeah. Do you ever get that? Um, this is like, this happened to me for a while where you'd had that exact experience, but then if I captured like an amazing shot, you know, like sometimes you have that Perla shot where you just go, that is everything I thought and more, and nothing could have improved the way that came together. And often like retrospectively, go, hold on a second, actually, a lot could have been improved. But, but there's that moment where you're going, I've nailed it.

Matt (45:15.35)

Yeah

Matt Krumins (45:18.562)

for me that sometimes used to be the point where my brain almost checked out of the dive and I was like, cool, I'm done. I'm going to go to the surface now. Like I'd only been there for 15 minutes, but like it was like mission accomplished, like achieved. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That's I remember having that, that experience on the Coolidge years and years and years ago, we were down in the galley and I had my wife there modeling and

Matt (45:26.698)

Ha

Matt (45:30.944)

Yep, I'm done. That's it. I'm going for Sundowners on the top deck.

Matt Krumins (45:45.74)

She had a torch on her wrist, one of those old, the light motion, you know, light things. And anyway, she helped, she had one of those big flasks, like a water flask thing, and it was lit up from underneath and it was glowing in front of her and we're at 49 meters or something. And anyway, take this shot. And I was just like, this is just everything I thought this shot would be and more, had a bit of Narcosis on that as well. And

Matt (46:07.488)

Hahaha!

Matt Krumins (46:08.844)

And I was just so convinced that everything was done. I was ready just to walk away. And then my heart started racing because I was like, this is so exciting. And then I realized I was getting into like a hyperventilation loop of just like, okay, can't keep up with this. Yeah, it's a, there's a moment when you haven't got a camera in your hand when you're underwater, you wouldn't know the feeling, but she's when you, when you nail the shot, it's yeah, that's something else.

Matt (46:20.982)

Ha ha ha ha

Matt (46:33.908)

it's awesome. Yeah. I've done a couple of whoop whoops underwater, that's for sure. Even the, the missus doesn't shoot with a, I call her a real camera. She's, she's all about the GoPro. But I must admit a couple of years ago when we did the Galapagos and I, at the time I only had a little G7 X Mark II I was taking with me with strobes and house and all that kind of stuff. And you done the Galapagos? Okay.

Matt Krumins (46:44.162)

Yep.

Matt Krumins (46:56.63)

I have not done a glide because I was all due and scheduled to do it and then it fell through sadly. It's on my hit list.

Matt (47:01.856)

unlucky. But anyway, it was great. So you missed out. Yeah, so I mean, I went with all my gear jumped in and I think I did four dives at Darwin's and thought, nah, sod it. This thing's just a pain in the ass. It's not getting any kind of good photography. And the next dive I jumped in with the spare GoPro and we got so much more from just having an action camera. But

Matt Krumins (47:06.048)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (47:29.175)

Yeah, right.

Matt (47:30.346)

You know, she, she's the one that's recording literally everything wherever we go, she's recording and every, every now and then there's a little turn and a raise of the eyebrows and a mask. And I can tell her she's got a good shot. She's happy.

Matt Krumins (47:41.326)

Ah, that's funny. You know, the GoPro is really interesting. did Tonga with one of Scott Portelli's groups last year. And there was a couple of people on that trip who had, you know, the latest and greatest GoPros. And they were shooting. And of course, because you're swimming around like a mad person trying to, know, in some cases, keep up with, you know, these heat runs and whatnot. And I'm sitting there trying to drag, you know, a 10 kilogram Nauticam, you know, eight inch dome port through the water.

And of course, because they were so agile, they were there with the shot. The clarity out of it was incredible because it doesn't really need autofocus. It just nailed everything. Whereas, you you're on the surface, so the water's interfering with autofocus and all sorts of stuff. There was a part of me that was, yeah, a bit peeved that I didn't try and simplify the video components of that. you would have been there.

Matt (48:30.092)

Yeah, I've got the 11, I think Jazz has got the 13 or whatever the latest one is. And with the stability that comes out of them now, I bolt one on the top of the camera housing. So I'll take my photos, but I'll just press record when I get in the water and leave it running. Any amount of times I've caught stuff. Sometimes, some, yeah.

Matt Krumins (48:42.765)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (48:47.744)

Now, do you do something with your footage? Do you edit? Do you play? is this one of those like, you know, the old GoPro when it first came out, and everyone was like recorded every single breath they took. And it just sort of, what do do with it? there's too much footage to do anything. I'm not sure.

Matt (48:55.66)

the

Matt (49:05.831)

Yeah, yeah. it's, fact, what I was doing at one point was, in fact, where were we? August last year, went up to Lady Musgrave with a couple of mates on their boat. And we did three days diving all over the little out reefs there. And again, as soon as I jump in, press record on it. And I was just doing the old tapping on the, whenever I saw something and I thought, oh, it'd be a good video.

I do a couple of taps on my camera housing just with a double-ended clip or whatever. And when I look back into the video footage, because it's an hour plus long for each dive, I just have a look at the spikes. I find the spikes and I just flash forward straight to it.

Matt Krumins (49:50.018)

That's a fantastic idea. Love that. Cause it's, it's true though. It looks like a lot of people, they do shoot all this great stuff, but because it's almost like the same as a photography thing, why I've so many photos when there's so much stuff there, sometimes it just doesn't, it's, you can't comprehend it. You can't do anything with it. There's too much. And so if you've got a system like that, that's a fantastic way to, I guess, ensure that you're still getting the moments, but you're not just, you know, creating work for yourself that, never gets done, you know?

Matt (49:52.204)

FCP is great for it.

Matt (50:07.818)

Yeah. Yeah.

Matt (50:19.5)

Yeah, yeah. And it's the same with the the photos, you if I have an hour underwater and there's plenty to shoot, you know, there's a few hundred photos that straight off the bat. I've got now into the habit of just doing the I use Lightroom like most people do. And I'll just skip through them and I'll do five star or one star. If it's a one star straight in the bin, five star, means I'm going to do something with it at some point, you know, and that's just my way of trying to cull it down a little bit.

Matt Krumins (50:46.542)

If you want a really handy hint with your Lightroom, especially with underwater photography. So if you go into your dive, so like you go into the folder where that dive is, you select all the images, you right click and down the bottom, there's the option that says stacking. So stacking is basically where you can kind of...

Matt (51:04.523)

yeah?

Matt Krumins (51:07.008)

it creates a stack of photos. So you only see the top of the stack, but you can have as many photos as you want sitting inside the stack. And if you open it, you can see what's there and rearrange what's on top, et cetera. But there's an option in there at the very bottom. It's called Auto Stack by Capture Time. And essentially what it does is it allows you to automatically group together photos that were shot within a particular amount of time. So I always kind of go.

In all sorts of photography, we don't usually get the photo in one. We usually get the photo in like 10 or 20, because you'll take a shot, you do a small improvement, you take another shot, small improvement, take another shot until you finally refine it to the end shot. And sometimes then you go a couple of steps too far and you got to backtrack it a little bit. But, but these, these shoots, you know, if you went for a dive, you might take say 200 photos, but you probably only had say like 10 subjects. You've got 20 photos of each subject.

Matt (51:37.238)

Mm-hmm.

Matt Krumins (52:01.186)

So with the auto stacking feature, you can go and use the slider to say that if the photos were shot less than 30 seconds apart, stack them together. And so what it can do is really simplify when you open your Lightroom, rather than seeing 200 individual photos, it's a total mess. It'll actually consolidate it down and it's pretty good. mean, obviously you want to go and check that it hasn't stacked multiple subjects together, but it basically puts it into the scenes that you shot.

And so you only need just like one photo of each scene, because you're not going to publish two images that are almost identical, where one's clearly better. So it's a really quick way to consolidate down what can be huge swathes of information into a much more kind of consumable amount of photos. And then you can kind of go into each of the stacks and go, cool, this was the best shot, drag it to the top of the stack, close the stack again. And rather than seeing all 20 or 30 options you had, it's giving you the top pick of the options only.

Matt (52:29.418)

Okay.

Matt (52:45.269)

Yeah.

Matt (52:57.9)

That's a great idea. Yeah.

Matt Krumins (52:59.23)

Yeah, it's a really good, especially historically, if you look back into your old trips, dive trips, you know, sometimes you come back with thousands of photos and you're like, I don't even know where to start. That auto stacking can be just, you know, one first step that makes it look a little more manageable.

Matt (53:08.812)

Yeah.

Matt (53:15.434)

Yeah, that'll probably help with the brain fart moments as well. You know, I start on the process of going through every single one and you know, about an hour in the brain just says, no, not interested. I to walk away. Bloody hell.

Matt Krumins (53:28.782)

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, definitely. It is hard to stay motivated when you're looking at them, especially when you're looking at a lot of photos that ultimately didn't turn out. can make you feel pretty rubbish. You know, you're thinking, well, I'm pretty crap. There's 2000 photos and only like three of them. I guess the important thing to consider is that you don't know how many photos your photography hero took before they presented the three photos to you. So yeah, never feel too bad about that side of it, I guess.

Matt (53:38.668)

Hmm.

Matt (53:43.468)

Yeah.

Matt (53:57.376)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So are you, let's talk a little bit about the camera courses that you do actually, because this will be a pre lead into are you gonna be doing it underwater as well?

Matt Krumins (54:05.848)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (54:11.686)

good question. So I run photography courses, all sorts of photography courses. So everything from beginners workshops for people who are first time picking up a camera, not underwater, but just in general, right through to I've started running trips to South Africa, doing wildlife workshops in Kruger and everything in between. So full day trips to five day trips up to the mountains and stuff. So I run all sorts of different workshops and courses. I used to run a lot of underwater photography courses, mostly through the dive clubs.

Melbourne especially, got a pretty clicky system in terms of clubs and things like that. It's a good way to, I guess, encourage people to get into the water and new divers to pick up something new as well. I still do run a lot of private workshops for underwater photography. I don't actually run anything in water, which is surprising to some people. They think that...

Underwater photography course means jumping in the water down at the beach and swimming around for five hours learning underwater photography. But the reality is, as I'm sure you've experienced yourself, is underwater, there's only so much you can communicate. all the workshops I do now are land-based workshops or more classroom-based. And so we do some practical experiments. They usually run over three or four nights. So we'll do the first night will be the basics. And then there's an assignment given to you. You've got two or three weeks to complete the assignment. We catch up again.

We review what you've done. We work on the next sort of more advanced section, which is usually to do with lighting, send you away for another two or three weeks to go and get some dives under your belt. And then we do a review and critique and an editing session on the third night. Sometimes it spills over to a fourth. So yeah, look, I think I will bring them back. I saying, I was in ocean divers the other day and dropping my gear in for a service. And I said to Jane that it's...

It's funny because as much as it's I've got so much experience in this space, you know, having not been in the water in Victoria for quite some time, you know, regularly, at least, I've got a bit of imposter syndrome in Victoria. So I think I need to get some dives under my belt before I feel confident, you know, going in and banging on about underwater photography down here again. So yeah, look, I think it'll definitely be in the pipeline. You know, my plans are really to have probably an underwater photography course on my website, an online version.

Matt Krumins (56:28.43)

because a lot of it is theory based. I know having gone through the self-teaching part of this before, there's a few really key people and key messages that I learned that were really pivotal moments in underwater photography. And I feel as though they're not always the ones that are communicated very well in courses that I've experienced or heard about. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot in there that we can kind of consolidate and yeah.

That'll be in the works at some point. Yeah.

Matt (57:00.148)

Yeah, yeah. I picked up on Kruger there. Kruger National Park. Do you stay in the park when you go?

Matt Krumins (57:04.844)

Yeah, that's it.

yeah, we stay about 25 minutes out of the park. So we stay in a, it's called Marloth Park. It's, it's, like, they've got their own game park there, but there's a, it's gated community of lodges, which is sort of on the border of Kruger. So doesn't, it's got a fence. You can go right up to Kruger fence line, but it's not in Kruger itself. The thing about staying in Kruger is your options are pretty limited and they're quite expensive. But the reality is that

Matt (57:25.846)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (57:36.87)

staying just outside you get basically the same access you get a bit more freedom in terms of moving around especially in the evenings and things like that. So yeah that's yeah look it's you know like if you're in a gated part of the park where you can be at night you know they're usually sort of camping areas or in very very lux lodges so yeah a lot more options when you start to to accept that minutes out of Kruger we're up probably half an hour earlier than those in the park but you know what

Matt (57:44.672)

Yeah, you're not gonna get eaten.

Matt (57:56.31)

Hmm.

Matt Krumins (58:04.61)

Who's sleepy anyway when you're so excited about what you might see the next day?

Matt (58:08.172)

Oh, mate, we did it, what was it? I'll say 2019 no, 2018. My mate was doing a couple of months in South Africa as a birthday present to himself. And we were due to meet up for the sardine run. And he hit me up and said, oh, mate, I'll hook you up. I'll hook you up. This is one those moments that I'll probably edit out of the show, but.

Matt Krumins (58:16.043)

yeah, nothing, yep.

Matt Krumins (58:25.678)

That's on my list.

Matt Krumins (58:31.862)

Is it as incredible as it sounds?

Matt (58:37.494)

There's a lot of fuckwits up there that are doing the operations and I'll put you straight in touch with the man and woman that you need to do it with.

Matt Krumins (58:37.902)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (58:44.588)

Yeah, okay. Is it everything that you like? I mean, I've seen photos, but I've yeah, it looks insane.

Matt (58:51.756)

Yeah, it's hard work on your back and you can have long cold days when you're bobbing around on the boat. But when it all goes off and you get in the water, you just can't help but laugh. It's fucking mental. When you've got sharks all around you, you've got a seal that comes past the sail, you've got a bird that's dive bombing through the top and there's a 3,000 head of dolphins.

Matt Krumins (58:58.978)

Yep.

Matt Krumins (59:05.133)

the

Matt (59:20.694)

pinging around you and a million little fish running for their life. It's just epic.

Matt Krumins (59:20.93)

That is it.

Matt Krumins (59:26.998)

I just can't picture, like to me that sounds like, you know, like Pandora's box of underwater animals. Just like, like someone just opened this box and like all the, all the spirits got out, you know, like it's just the photos I've seen, I can't even fathom what it would be like to be in the water with that. Like just the adrenaline would just be insane.

Matt (59:48.652)

Well, the same guy that I did the Kruger part with, Deano his name is Deano Jenkins. And we were coming up to Port St. John's and we were discussing and he's like, all I want to see, and I can't do a Welsh accent, but imagine a Welsh accent. All I want to see is dolphins. I've never seen dolphins in the water when I'm diving. So Deano, I guarantee you're going to see dolphins. And that was the word I used was guarantee. He no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You cannot guarantee that I'm going to see anything. It's wildlife. You cannot guarantee.

like I'm going to guarantee it. you know, first day and he's in the water and just jumped off the back, you know, these dolphins appeared, he's jumped off the water with one of my other mates and you could just hear raucous laughter through a snorkel for the next 45 minutes. It's a formidable location.

Matt Krumins (01:00:18.414)

Mmm.

Matt Krumins (01:00:32.974)

That's amazing. Although I'm going to tell you that when you say guarantee, I kind of agree with him. I go back to Koh Tao for a second. I don't know about your experience there. You obviously stayed a lot longer than I did. So I'm sure you had more luck than me, but I arrived in Koh Tao in late December, just after Christmas. And I had a friend come over with me just to like help sort of settle in and you know, when you don't know anyone and stuff.

Matt (01:00:45.878)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:01:00.992)

And, and he was a bit into diving as well. So we went out for a couple of dive days and, there was, know, the call out on the radio is that there was a whale shark right in the bay, like right close on in. And, of course, you know, every boat in Koh Tao was there and we jumped in the water and it was just like insane. It was probably like the equivalent of the sardine run, but with people and, this big goofy whale sharks kind of bobbing about doing its thing. And that was amazing. And anyway, I said to my mate, look,

Matt (01:01:22.183)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:01:30.208)

It's pretty crazy. And I had a macro lens on my camera as well from that from the dive that we were on. So was like, I'm not gonna get a shot, you know, I went in and I grabbed the shot of a spot. Anyway, I thought I'll stuff it, jumped back on the boat, went to go and change a lens to try and get a nice shot and stuff like that. And then I said to him, look, you know what, don't even bother. I'm going to be here for ages. I'll see heaps of whale sharks. I've been told they're here all the time. That was it. That was the only one.

Matt (01:01:41.75)

Hahaha!

Matt (01:01:55.34)

Yep. It's the torture of Koh Tao, know. Well, shark season comes and there's those people that never see them. And then there's some that are very lucky. And thankfully I was quite lucky. I saw quite a lot while I was there. Yeah. But the...

Matt Krumins (01:01:59.384)

So all those guarantees I'd been told.

Matt Krumins (01:02:09.784)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:02:15.818)

very jealous. My whale stocking has been very limited,

Matt (01:02:19.692)

Yeah, they're only young pups though. I didn't see anything much bigger than four meters, but still, it's a reasonable size.

Matt Krumins (01:02:31.948)

And know what? Optics, the right lens can turn a four meter whale shark into a 15 meter whale shark if you're clever.

Matt (01:02:37.978)

yeah. yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mate, there's a few times I've been, I've been looking for macro for customers out at Chumpon Pinnacle and the rock that's off at the back there, Barracuda Rock. And I've got my face into the coral looking for macro stuff thinking, shit, these people are going to see nothing. It's crap. And I just get this yank of the fins and look over my shoulder and there's a, there's a whale shark just there, you know, and it's the guest that's behind you trying to get your attention. Cause he's about to run into it, into the back of your noggin.

Matt Krumins (01:03:06.702)

I love it, love it. good memories from that place, yeah.

Matt (01:03:08.684)

Yeah, no, that's good. Yeah, but no Sardine run, you've got to do it,

Matt Krumins (01:03:14.19)

Yeah. I'm thinking that might be on one of my lists because that's a June, July thing. Isn't it? Yeah. Cause I run my workshops over there in July, August. So, um, it's my 40th birthday next year. So, um, and I'll be turning 40 the week before I have my workshop trips. So that might just be a little, little side present. There we go. I'll canvas that one tonight over a bottle of wine.

Matt (01:03:19.594)

Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.

Matt (01:03:28.075)

Me!

Matt (01:03:35.052)

That's the way to do it. Yeah, that's the way to do it.

Matt Krumins (01:03:40.586)

And yeah, I'll grab those details.

Matt (01:03:40.652)

Yeah.

Well, it's the yeah, it's Offshore Africa. Rob Nettleton and Debbie Smith and Debbie Smith is Hall of Famer. Lovely couple. They're the only ones that operate their 365. They actually operate directly out of Port St. John and fabulous people and they've got a spotter plane as well. you know, you sit around and wait for the spotter plane to tell you where to go and how did it whether you put you.

Matt Krumins (01:04:06.11)

brilliant.

Matt (01:04:11.648)

your dive gear on or your snorkel gear, you know exactly what to do before you even get there. It's brilliant.

Matt Krumins (01:04:15.726)

that makes life a lot easier. I'm waiting for the day when they have spotted drones and they send out like a swarm of drones just to cover huge vast areas of the ocean. I'm not sure how many will make it back to the boat, but yeah.

Matt (01:04:27.776)

Yeah. I'm in a certain, I'm in a little group on Facebook that shall not be named, but it's these people using drones and just doing what the hell they want. And I was on one on there the other day with, you took a screenshot of his, his controller is 6.2 kilometers away from him. Holy crap. I wouldn't have the balls to do that. I'd expect it to drop in the water.

Matt Krumins (01:04:47.222)

Yeah, it's

Matt Krumins (01:04:52.374)

Yeah, look, I know of people doing those sorts of flights. I mean, I guess it's not something I'll have done myself just for the record, but I can sort of see as well where you go. These days, drones are relatively speaking inexpensive compared to what they were. And if that means that you're achieving whatever it was. look, flying over the ocean is probably one of the safer places to be flying at compared to some of the places I've seen people do those long distances.

Matt (01:05:03.698)

Hahaha.

Matt Krumins (01:05:21.326)

You know, it's a, it's going to be an incredible technology when they work out how to regulate that properly. think the issue with me and the drone thing I have an issue with at the moment is probably people's not looking at the regulations around, you know, flying over Whales and stuff like that is probably a big one. I, not to go down that path too much, but you, you know, you've got, you've got tourism agencies, you know, promoting on Instagram, all these shots of Whales and competitions being won by people photographing Whales from directly above at low altitude.

Matt (01:05:26.796)

Hmm.

Matt Krumins (01:05:51.17)

which is obviously a no-no. And you kind of can't help but think that there's a lot of reward in the wrong behavior in drone stuff at the moment, which makes it quite difficult, I'm sure, for them to regulate. And yeah, as technologies get better, as you say, and people can fly them for six kilometers, that's all good and well until there's a couple of spotter planes in the area, and you're on the same altitude and the same collision course. You've seen it happen in the States recently with the wildfire planes and stuff.

It's a pretty hairy thing and I think everyone thinks they're okay until they're not okay, you It's always concerning. It's probably like unlicensed diving in a way, isn't it? You can actually probably get a lot of you don't have your ticket, but you run into problems and you'll soon find out why people got their ticket.

Matt (01:06:20.086)

Yeah.

Matt (01:06:26.732)

That's.

It is.

Matt (01:06:35.722)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said that saying that everything's okay until it's not okay. That's, yeah. I was literally, I was nearly late for this catch up with you because I got so engrossed this morning. I'm planning a round table on liveaboard safety. So there's quite a few of the industry titans and operators as well, and even some people that have been in liveaboard incidents.

Matt Krumins (01:06:42.2)

Yeah.

And

Matt Krumins (01:06:56.48)

yeah.

Matt (01:07:05.196)

that are going to be sat around the table. And I was just completely engrossed in it. And that saying of it's okay until it's not okay came up so many times.

Matt Krumins (01:07:14.742)

Yeah, it's a pretty common thing. think I mean, I see it in diving or I've seen it in diving a lot, you whether it's people exceeding depth limits or diving on the wrong gas, or not having pony bottles or not having the extra piece of gear or not having buddies. And yeah, look, probably 99 % of the time people get away with it. And, you know, that's amazing. And then the one time they don't, unfortunately, that's kind of, I guess what ruins it for everyone. It's almost like when people take underwater photography and there's

Matt (01:07:34.956)

Hmm.

Matt Krumins (01:07:43.682)

There's a lot of ethical issues that go into underwater photography that I think are unspoken. No one wants to talk about them because they might actually end up limiting what you can and can't or should and shouldn't do. And look, as an individual, the one time you do something yet might not make a difference, but statistically something's going to happen. We saw, I remember UP Dive Resort, I went there and...

they had a, they used to have the shark feeding on the pier. So you'd sit underneath like the pier and they'd basically not chum the water, but they'd feed the sharks there and they'd all come in and you could watch the feeding frenzy underwater until one day some idiot after a few drinks jumped in off the pier during that frenzy. was, I think I'm going to say, I think they were bitten or there was an incident there and obviously not.

Matt (01:08:09.995)

Okay.

Matt Krumins (01:08:32.494)

I don't think it was a bad, bad one, but it just cut the whole situation. said, no, not again. And so that's been, you know, that's been culled now. You see people touching reeds, doing all sorts of things that they think is just that one time. But that cumulation and, you know, when you start adding all those statistics together, it does kind of ruin it for everybody. Yeah, it's a pretty, pretty tough thing to, to, to, to cope with, I think, because underwater photography, especially it's such a challenging market. There's so many competitions, there's so much competition to be the best.

And I think it does sometimes force people to maybe to do things they're not terribly proud of. And it's a really slippery slope to fall into. think it's, you've got to make sure you stay on the right side of that line.

Matt (01:09:12.49)

Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting one because I do wonder sometimes how difficult it is for judges for competitions because there are people and you know, it doesn't take a genius to work out that a photo has been taken by manipulation. There's no way on God's green earth that photo has occurred because you happen to be in the right place at the right time. No chance.

Matt Krumins (01:09:31.982)

Mm.

Matt Krumins (01:09:35.852)

And then it's equally, I can look at the flip side of that because I totally agree with you on that. but if you look at the flip side, half the time, you know, it is the, what are the bloody chances of seeing that that make it an amazing photo. And if you put enough people in the water for enough time, you know, these things happen. I've got a mate who got it. actually, funny. The only photo he's ever had like real credit for, he got into national geographic and then added the natural history museum in London. was.

Matt (01:09:49.93)

Hmm.

Matt Krumins (01:10:04.042)

under a local pier here, but he happened to get into the water on a day where an octopus got attacked by a seal. And so it's full on like, you know, like sharknado style scene of this octopus like, you know, splayed out and he was low in the water and the seals grabbing it and pulling it away. His name is Phil Davison. And this is the sort of photo that I think is, it runs the risk of someone going, why is he, why is he

you know, killing an octopus and giving it to a seal, because that would get you the shot. Now that was very unethical way of doing it. He happened to come across this day where he's just like, what the hell? And I think the saving grace for him was he was shooting on a pretty rubbish camera at the time, comparatively speaking to, you know, what the pros were using, the clarity of it's not completely perfect. So I don't think it's got the finesse to make it look as though you'd put a lot of effort into setting something like this up, but

Matt (01:10:36.459)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:10:58.274)

that is a really what the hell are the chances. And I think if he had a shot that on really high end gear that was perfectly lit and he got all those other factors completely, you know, A grade, I reckon people would have gone after him for that and said, hold on, this is what happened. You know, I've had this with Weedy Sea Dragons in Victoria. You know, they do generally hang around the weeds, but there definitely are times, especially on surgery days.

where they do come up out of the weeds and they can be, you we're not talking high up in the water column, but they might be, you know, half a meter to a meter up in the water column. Now, if you've got a large wide angle lens and you can get right down into the sand, you can get under those things and you're not pushing them into the ocean or up into the water column, but you can get that low angle. That said, what do most people do? Cause they can't be bothered getting low into the ground or low into the sand. You know, it's a little bit of water up drift to try and get them up there. So there, there are definitely times where things happen that are real, but

You that's a, you can't, you sort of have to take the innocent until proven guilty, unfortunately, because otherwise everything seems to be, you know, what are the chances? Well, that's what makes it special, hey, sometimes. But there are definitely other things, as you say, that they're pretty obvious. know, certain things don't live in certain places or eat certain things or do certain things. And yeah, I had a competition I judged ages ago. It was for the Western Australia underwater.

Matt (01:11:59.019)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:12:22.08)

society or something like that. And it was a natural lighting competition. So it was all meant to be completely natural light, no strobes. And one of the shots that got sent in, I noticed that the fish had brighter bellies than they did backs. And I was trying to work out where in the ocean the light source comes from below rather than above. couldn't quite get there. So yeah, that was a pretty obvious one, you know, it's, yeah, it can be really hard to tell.

Matt (01:12:47.404)

Yeah.

Yeah, that again.

Matt Krumins (01:12:51.022)

I will say with that, the advice I give people who are listening to this who might be kind of going, well, what, does that line sit or whatnot? I always say that the easiest way to do this is to go, if you submitted that photo to the world's greatest photo competition and you won and you were asked to provide the backstory and you were going to be completely honest about the backstory, would you be proud of the words you're saying? And if you're not, if you feel at all awkward about the words you're saying,

Matt (01:13:13.388)

Mmm.

Matt Krumins (01:13:17.174)

or that you don't think, if you feel like you have to manipulate the truth in any way to make it sound more palatable, that's probably a red flag. But if you can go into it and explain your photograph with pride and be really truly proud of the photo you've just taken with all that went with that, I think you can be pretty happy. And I think you can tick that box. And it's the only way to keep some flexibility in that space without drawing really hard lines.

Matt (01:13:25.292)

Yeah.

Matt (01:13:44.01)

Yeah, yeah, fair one, fair one. So what's the plans this year then? obviously you're gonna be jumping in locally. Are you planning anything else?

Matt Krumins (01:13:51.65)

Yeah, lots of local stuff. We I've got so one of the guys who does our guiding in Kruger, he's starting a dive operation in Mozambique. So that's, that's a maybe a potential to scoot over for a couple of days, we'll see. In the underwater photography space, to be honest, I think that locals probably going to be my, my hero this year, I've got a lot of other travel on where we've got I've got three trips to South Africa this year. I've got a couple of weeks up or three or four weeks up in the mountains. And

Matt (01:14:02.156)

Matt Krumins (01:14:20.526)

We're hoping to book a family holiday over June for a few weeks, which would be, yeah, take up a lot of our time. So yeah, there's opportunities that poke up. always, always jumping on board with them. But I think at the moment, I'm looking forward to getting back in locally and probably going back and looking at the photos I've taken in the past and seeing what I could do to replicate and improve on that and get myself excited about those basics again, you know, rather than necessarily going out and finding the big stuff and.

Matt (01:14:42.422)

Hmm.

Matt Krumins (01:14:49.068)

Yeah, relying too much on the subject matter. think sometimes it's focus on what's around you and making things look beautiful rather than just searching for beautiful things is a good way to go.

Matt (01:14:58.796)

It's going to be an interesting experiment, you know, to see not only the end product of what you had years ago to what you get now, but also how the, the landscape down there, is now, whether it's changed, if it has changed, then by how much, you know,

Matt Krumins (01:15:17.198)

100%. I think there has been a lot of change and I don't think I'm probably aware of the change as much as I should be. Hence why running underwater photography courses down here at the moment, I need to get my feet wet down here to be able to really relate back to those challenges again. You know, know that there's been a lot of change in terms of what's going on around the piers here. There's been a lot of construction work. We've got a lot more tourism down here locally now as well, which has had a big impact apparently.

You know, the Bay has been apparently really great for visibility and things like that. And we've had pretty good days, a pretty great summer for it. So I think there's going to be some real pros and cons in it. A lot of the wrecks, you know, there's been more deterioration, of course, over time. So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens. But I think I'm just excited about being excited about my own backyard again. You know, it's always good to look abroad and see what else is out there. But there is something really nice, especially about living in a place like Melbourne, where it's not as popular.

Matt (01:15:56.94)

Hmm.

Matt (01:16:03.755)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:16:13.486)

to dive, it's not as well known. Certainly no one's traveling from overseas to come and see anything other than the sea dragons maybe. It's really nice to able to present that to the world in a way where people go, what, where are you? And then to be explained that just an hour down the coast in Melbourne, that's a pretty awesome feeling. I think it's a lot more rewarding sometimes than being in a reef situation where it's known to be the world's best reef. Well, there's no reason why your photo shouldn't look amazing, it's the world's best reef.

Matt (01:16:41.529)

Hahaha

Matt Krumins (01:16:42.798)

Yeah, make this place look absolutely amazing. And that's a challenge and a real accomplishment when you nail it.

Matt (01:16:48.992)

Yeah. Yeah. Hey, and I'm just thinking about Melbourne actually. You have to give a cheeky little shout out to the Flinders Pier community or whatever their title is, but they did the campaign to prevent major construction or reconstruction or demolition of the pier itself and save the weedy habitat underneath. I can't remember his surname to save my life, but Charles, I can't remember it was, but I several emails back and forth with him, but bravo to those guys.

Matt Krumins (01:17:09.602)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:17:15.352)

Yeah, I'm not sure.

Matt (01:17:18.753)

and girls.

Matt Krumins (01:17:18.996)

Yeah, it's an important thing because it's an unknown, know, like, it's easy to say, well, if you don't have the peer, there's lots of other habitat there. There's lots of grassy areas and things, but you just don't know. And when there's so few locations, you can actually go to see these things. It makes you wonder, you know, just how isolated they are. You know, you've got Portsea Pier, you've got a population there, you've got a population at Flinders Pier, but there's really nowhere else I know of where you can reliably see them. You know, some out on the reef, but not in any decent numbers.

Yeah, it does take a very dedicated group of people to campaign for something like that because it's honestly not something that most of the public really care about or know about. I do think that's almost like the role of underwater photography in my world is.

Matt (01:17:57.249)

Yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:18:04.238)

You know, I don't dedicate a lot of my time to those causes specifically. Like I don't, I'm not a volunteer in those organizations or anything like that. It's, just for a lack of time generally. But the way I like to sort of think underwater photography contributes to that is you show people beautiful photos of something and all of a sudden they realize, oh, that's just there. You know, it's, it's, it's almost the advertising campaign component of it. So, um, yeah, hats off to all the, uh, the divers who have been, uh, under Flinders Pier taking those photos and make people realize that, you know, what, what they're going to miss if, um, if they let our stuff go.

Go ahead.

Matt (01:18:35.156)

Yeah, yeah, fair play. play. Yeah. And what else you got on then? You've got the diving going on. So.

Matt Krumins (01:18:42.786)

Got the diving going on. I've just done my drone qualifications. yeah, that tells you basically I'm busy bugger off. Surprisingly effective. know, it's look, I love, I almost feel like this is my like the new Trinity. It's like sea land and sky photography all in one. So,

Matt (01:18:46.398)

I saw that, yeah. You got one of those nice flasher jackets with saying drone operator on the back of it.

Matt Krumins (01:19:08.558)

I'm kind of enjoying the idea of maybe embarking on a bit of a project that incorporates all three of those aspects, you know, getting back into a bit of video stuff as well. I'd love to be able to, years and years and years ago, like I'm talking 2011, 2012, I pulled together a video that was called...

beneath the surface, Victoria beneath the surface or something. It was like a three-parter. And it was kind of like this whole, are you actually missing out on? You go down the beach and you see this scape that looks like sand and seaweed, but actually here's what's under the water. And the video footage is total trash. Like it is really bad compared to like modern technology, you know? You could do a much better job with just a single GoPro and a candle. It's something I'd love to recreate in a more professional way. And I think now having, you know, the aerial stuff.

Matt (01:19:50.444)

You

Matt Krumins (01:19:58.938)

I've got lot of experience in the land stuff and the underwater stuff. It'll be really exciting to maybe see if I can recreate that as Victoria's little promo. So that'd be kind of cool. But yeah, that's kind of my world, to be honest. Yeah, we live a pretty busy existence. I probably run close to 150 to 200 workshops a year. So yeah, and then I do corporate commercial work, which is often quite boring as well.

Matt (01:20:08.906)

Yeah.

Matt (01:20:20.758)

Jesus.

Matt Krumins (01:20:25.992)

but it's good to mix it up. keeps, keeps me balanced and sane. and so, yeah, at the moment it's, it's, you know, take, take things on as you can. And yeah, at the moment, just focusing on getting this water, this camera wet again. And, yeah, try and, try and reignite that, that spark and give myself some time back, which would be nice. Yeah. That's it. That's it.

Matt (01:20:26.144)

Yeah.

Matt (01:20:46.784)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get that relaxation back in your life. Yeah, fair play.

Matt Krumins (01:20:52.93)

Now there was, I had a question for you as well. It struck me. had the shower thought on my way into the city this morning, actually. And have you considered, ever considered a name change, like an official name change to have your middle name as under?

Matt (01:21:09.756)

yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:21:10.872)

Cause that would be amazing if, I don't know. I don't know if you were just like living up to the family reputation, but I'm thinking if you could get an official Matt underwaters would be pretty, pretty epic.

Matt (01:21:14.316)

Ha

Matt (01:21:23.892)

It's, yeah, ironically I've my citizenship ceremony coming up on the 27th of Feb. And we must be brothers from another mother or something because literally what you've just said is what crossed my mind yesterday when the email came through. What's your full name? Can you confirm your full name? I was so tempted.

Matt Krumins (01:21:34.776)

Perfect time to change.

Matt Krumins (01:21:43.79)

That's amazing. would definitely, a hundred percent. mean, unless it jeopardizes citizenship, but yeah, that would be fantastic. I'd definitely be buying that domain.

Matt (01:21:51.304)

Yeah, And then, yeah. Well, and if you're if you're into astrology as well, I'm actually, I'm born on the day that it crosses over from Aquarius to Pisces. So either carry water or I'm a fish, one of the two.

Matt Krumins (01:22:08.878)

There you go. That's you've got it all lined up here, I reckon. Yeah, true, true.

Matt (01:22:13.504)

Well, you'd kind of hope so, wouldn't you? Too easy. All right, Matty, I think we'll wrap it up and let you crack on with another G&T and I'll get ready for going to the Lads Curry Club.

Matt Krumins (01:22:25.27)

Yeah, no worries.

Matt Krumins (01:22:29.742)

Fantastic. Well, thanks for having me. yeah, it's nice to be on a show like this, especially with seeing some of the guests you've got on here. feel like we're, yeah, gone back to the small fish for this one, it'll be, hopefully I'll come back roaring this year and yeah, throw my name into the hat again.

Matt (01:22:39.862)

Ha ha ha.

Matt (01:22:47.114)

Mate, there's no small fish in this pond. Everyone's equal. Everyone's got a story to tell. Everyone's got an experience to share. And it's just the right way to do it. There's no hierarchy in this pond, I tell you.

Matt Krumins (01:23:02.835)

Love it. Love

Matt (01:23:04.214)

Are you going to be coming up to the dive show in March at all?

Matt Krumins (01:23:10.452)

I have no idea of a dive show in March to be perfectly honest. Yeah, what are we, what's going on?

Matt (01:23:13.388)

well, there's this, we've got ADEX, which is the Asian Dive Expo. So you usually get the ones in Singapore and all that as well. But ADEX has actually now acquired OZTek as well. So what was the technical conference? The two are going to be under the same roof. So it's like mid-March, I think like 16th, 17th, something like that. And then there's the, and then there's the go Diving show in September as well. That's up in Sydney too.

Matt Krumins (01:23:32.397)

Matt Krumins (01:23:37.72)

There you go.

Matt Krumins (01:23:43.522)

Fantastic. Well, I'll definitely have a look. I was at OZTek in Melbourne a couple of years ago. It was after COVID, presenting just on one of the side stages there, but I didn't realise it was back in full swing in that. So I'll definitely check it out. Yeah, would love to pop up and get part of that industry again. It's been a while.

Matt (01:24:06.42)

Mate, Melbourne one that you've just, OZTek Melbourne, two years ago, that was the one that I just missed you. I was interviewing someone else because I was down there as well. And I was running around doing little mini interviews and I just missed you. Yeah.

Matt Krumins (01:24:14.798)

Alright

Yep. Well, you probably caught me at a better time now. think a couple of years ago, if you asked me what I'd been doing with underwater photography lately, yeah, I was drawing on some relatively distant experiences at that point. So yeah, there's been a bit more water under the bridge now. So yeah, and a much better place for it.

Matt (01:24:23.53)

you

Matt (01:24:34.732)

Beauty, beauty. Well, I look forward to seeing how it all goes and the photos that come out the other end as well.

Matt Krumins (01:24:42.626)

Yeah, fantastic. We'll be in touch and yeah, I'll hopefully catch you at OZTek

Matt (01:24:47.669)

Alright brother, thank you very much for your time and for you guys listening out there, thank you very much. Bye bye for now.

Matt Krumins (01:24:54.616)

See ya.