SPEAKERS

Leigh Bishop

Leigh Bishop has been exploring shipwrecks for the last two decades and was one of the first British divers to use mixed gas in order to explore deep wrecks. He spent most of the 1980's as a dry caver before joining the CDG and taking up diving. He dived his first wreck in the 1980's and has since dedicated himself to shipwreck research & exploration. During the 1990's he spent most of his time diving with the Starfish Enterprise deep wreck diving team led by the late Polly Tapson, a team who continually pushed the boundaries of sport diving. Over the last two decades he has dived an estimated 400 virgin shipwrecks mainly in the English Channel where there are at least 4500 known shipwrecks!

Leigh is best known for his extensive photography and articles about shipwrecks, which have appeared in hundreds of magazines over the last decade. He pioneered the art of shooting fast black & white film with long exposure times by mounting his housed cameras on fixed tripods and setting them up on the seabed's around specific shipwrecks often in depths of 400ft.

He has been a member of four Britannic and three Lusitania expeditions as well as a member of expeditions to the Artic to search for the lost submarine X5.

He has joined expeditions as a photographer and exploration diver to wrecks such as the famous gold ship the 'Egypt' sunk in deep water off northwest France and the Niagara off New Zealand as well as the Transylvania sunk in the North Atlantic in 450ft of water. In 2003 he was a photographer on a NOAA scientific expedition to Titanic and the same year travelled to the Baltic Sea to photograph the Nazi liner Wilhelm Gustloff, Maritimes biggest shipwreck disaster with an estimated 10,000 lives lost when the ship went down. Leigh has led expeditions himself that have discovered significant U-Boats as well as lost British Submarines and with his teams became the first to explore previously lost wrecks such as HMS Charybdis, HMS Limbourne and the submarines HMS Affray & Vandal. His first expedition to the battleship King Edward VII became the first of its kind to explore a wreck deeper than 100m in European waters.

He is still a caver and in recent years was also a member of the 2009 cocklebiddy cave diving expedition on the Australian Nullabour and extensively photographed the famous Toad Hall with the late Agnes Milowka.

Today he lectures on the subject of shipwrecks extensively and during the English off season he travels the world regularly attending major diving industry shows headlining speaker line ups. In England he lectures at museums and nautical conferences and restores artifacts from shipwrecks which can be seen in several English Museums. He also writes treatments for television shipwreck documentaries and appears in many of them as a leading exploration expert, using rebreather technology of which he has been involved in the significant development of, with UK companies.

He is also the co-founder and organiser of the now successful 'EUROTEK' conferences the equivalent technical and advanced diving conference to OZTeK but based in Europe. www.eurotek.uk.com

His own website includes many of his images and expeditions and can be found at www.deepimage.co.uk