What is Wild Ocean Photography?
My (Rosanna Milligan) interest in marine wildlife photography started in earnest about 20 years ago when I discovered that it was about the only way I could pass time on the Scottish fishing trawlers I was surveying without getting seasick. After a couple of years of fisheries observing, and a lot of SCUBA diving in the green waters of Scottish sea lochs, I moved onto deep-sea research and the camera came with me. Eventually I created a website to display them on, and Wild Ocean Photography was created.
After 30 years in Scotland, I moved to South Florida in 2016 where I currently work as a researcher and lecturer at Nova Southeastern University and get to spend my time trying to better understand how deep-sea ecosystems function, and their importance to humans. Transitioning from being a post-doc to faculty in late 2018, followed by the pandemic and everything that came with that put a pretty big pause on the photography hobby for a while, but I'm glad to be picking it up again and will hopefully get some more chances to get out and about with the camera again.
On this website you'll find photographs that I've taken throughout my life on, in, and around the oceans. Most come from the wild, rugged coasts of Scotland with all their amazing complexity, colour, and biodiversity, but you'll find more and more from around the tropics, plus a few other places I've had the privilege to travel along the way. There's a range of seascapes, landscapes, and wildlife photographs in the mix, but you'll also see images of some of the people who work at sea, highlighting both our human reliance on the oceans as well as how we can impact them. Each photograph means something important to me personally, and hopefully you'll find something in here that you also enjoy.
I don't typically photoshop my wildlife photographs beyond the usual basic adjustments, and I'll never knowingly use generative AI to modify my photos - what you see is what was really there. Where images have been more heavily edited or composites, you'll be able to find that information clearly listed in the image description. I also believe that wildlife photography should be of wild animals in their natural environment, and so you will not find any images of captive or trained animals on the website, and I make every effort to ensure that the wild animals I photograph aren't disturbed or stressed by my presence. The obvious exceptions here are the specimen photographs: those animals were all captured during research projects, and were not captured or discarded without good reason. For more information about the research work I do, you can check out my lab's website at: www.deepseascape.com.
