Fact file
Richard Fitzpatrick
Emmy Award-winning cinematographer and marine biologist who specialises in sharks.
Age 52. Lives in Cairns. Married to Belinda.
In 2015, Richard Fitzpatrick worked with natural historian David Attenborough. It was a career highlight. “It’s amazing when you see your film for the first time, with his voice and an orchestra behind it,” he says. Fitzpatrick is globally acclaimed for the Barrier Reef nature films he shot for the BBC, National Geographic, Discovery Channel and others. He worked just once on location with the globally renowned naturalist, shooting a series about the Great Barrier Reef.
“What normally happens is, you’ve got your natural history crew and spend a year or two doing all the work,” he explains. “Then [Attenborough] comes in with a separate crew for a week or two, shoots all the links and he’s gone. You don’t get much contact time. But, during the writing [of the series], he was involved quite heavily. His correspondence went backwards and forwards about the sequences that needed to be shot, what stories needed to be told. That’s always cool.”
Fitzpatrick can boast plenty of highlights in his own right. He has won local and international cinematographic awards and penned a thrill-aminute book, Shark Tracker: Confessions of an Underwater Cameraman, which recalls hair-raising tales such as catching sharks with his bare hands. He doesn’t do much of that these days, although he was recently out on the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef where 38 sharks – tigers, bulls and hammerheads – were caught and tagged.
This story is from the June 2023 edition of Money Magazine Australia.
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This story is from the June 2023 edition of Money Magazine Australia.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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