Jürgen Freund
Wildlife Photographer
Bio
Jürgen was born in Dortmund, Germany. He studied engineering and found out it wasn't creative enough for his inventive mind. Retiring from designing machines, he worked as an industrial photographer in Munich for 7 years. Lured by the challenge of marine wildlife photography, he acquired an underwater camera even before learning how to scuba-dive in 1981 in the cold lakes of Germany. Finally, he answered the "call of the sea" and became a full-time freelance wildlife photojournalist in 1995. He traveled all over the world, taking acclaimed pictures published in numerous international magazines and winning many prestigious nature and wildlife awards in the process. For many years the conservation organization Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) has used his images for many of their conservation campaigns...
Jürgen now lives in Australia and the Great Barrier Reef is "at his doorstep." He has seen a different beauty in the Great Barrier Reef not found in many parts of his dive travels in Asia -- he sees more reef fish, more sharks, abundant hard corals, friendly whales -- and scientific surveys help him confirm a lot of his personal observations. Scientific marine research also helps him understand in a deeper way conditions of marine life. In recent years, extremely strong cyclones have greatly damaged a lot of the reefs accessible by tourist live-aboard, and this he has recently witnessed. He is interested to see the conditions of reefs in the far north and observe reefs hardly seen by the ordinary diver. In December 2008, Jürgen went with marine scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science to the farthest end of the Great Barrier Reef all the way to Cape York...
During this expedition, International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) is working with Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation to assist in documenting their five-year long Global Reef Expedition...
