Real beauty lies beneath the surface

Amazing underwater photography from Alex Tipple

Australian photographer Alex Tipple regularly gets beaten in the head with his 5kg underwater camera but with shots like this one, it's definitely worth it. He captures split second, stunning images of swimmers and surfers emerging underwater just off the Australian coast.

"Most of the time I come off worse than the people I'm shooting"

The 29 year-old captures the precise moment a wave breaks and surfers are drawn under, resulting in images of stunning clarity with an interesting twist on abstract photography. Tipple decided to shoot these kind of images after becoming frustrated with "normal" surf photography. From being a surfer since childhood, riding out the waves comes naturally to him, but it took a lot of determination and getting it wrong, before he got it right. The pictures produced don't just happen, he regularly suffers for his art. "Most of the time I come off worse than the people I'm shooting," he admits.

He first started shooting waves by surfing with a video camera strapped to his helmet. The rig "would record underwater when I was being thrashed by a wave," he recalls. "When I duck dove, it produced a few cool images but not to the extent that I was looking for." After adapting his camera and perfecting his talent, he has transformed a simple idea of seeing how waves look underwater along with the riders themselves, to showcasing modern snap shots of ocean beauty.