As a surf photographer, Seth de Roulet spends a lot of time paddling about in some of the most treacherous seas in the world. He uses no flotation aids, just a pair of flippers and his camera. Some of the waves he captures are 60ft high.

One day the Hamilton Parish resident was knocked unconscious when another surfer fell directly on him.

“A bunch of guys came and helped me, but I woke up underwater and made it to the surface on my own,” he said. “They just helped me get to shore.”

It was just another day at the office for the photographer whose work has appeared in magazines such as Surfer, The Surfer’s Journal and Newsweek, among many others. He has also worked for clients such as Red Bull, X-treme Video and Monster.

His first solo photography show in Bermuda, Bending Light: Photographs by Seth de Roulet is on now at the Bermuda National Gallery at City Hall in Hamilton.

“The show is about shapes, lines and textures, accentuated by film grain,” Mr de Roulet said. “It’s not a body of work so much as an exploration of a type of film through all walks of photography.”

Originally from New York, he and his family were living in California when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

“We were stuck in our backyard with lockdowns like everyone else,” Mr de Roulet said. “My wife said ‘your grandmother’s house in Bermuda is empty. Let us see if we can stay there for a couple of months’.”

The photographer had often spent summers here as a child. A couple months in Bermuda quickly turned into five years.

Some of his photographs appeared in the 2022 Bermuda Biennial at the BNG.

He started taking photographs when he was just 4. When he got older, he wanted to become a professional snowboarding photographer. Going to university on the West Coast changed his mind.

“I took my first wave photograph when I was at art school at the Brooks Institute in Ventura, California,” he said. “I don’t remember the specific photograph. There have been so many since then.”

Mr de Roulet was instantly hooked on surf photography. He loved the blend of high-end athletics and art.

“The two coming together gave me this avenue to continue to be an athlete, risk my life, get that adrenalin rush and be an artist at the same time,” he said.

Each wave he shoots has its own unique challenges. One shot might involve enormous waves, and considerable risk to life and limb, while another wave might not be quite so scary, but take six months, and 200,000 frames to get right.

“There is no hardest and easiest shot,” Mr de Roulet said. “They all have their merits. There is a big difference between photographing 50ft surf, where your life is on the line, and then the little nuances of small waves, which is really about creating art and beauty and using the light.”

When shooting surfers, he is often only two or three feet away from them, sometimes in a channel and sometimes directly in the line of fire, along with them.

“In surfing, you can take some savage beatings,” he said. “Sometimes you are underwater and praying for your life. It is a scary moment when one of those big waves land on you. You just have to stay calm, stay relaxed and survive.”

He is trained in water rescue, and has had surfers knocked from their boards, pop up unconscious right next to him in the water.

“Surfers are a brotherhood,” he said. “We are all there to make sure everybody gets back to shore alive, and in one piece. We all train in back and neck stabilisations, and how to wake people up after they have been knocked out.”

Mr de Roulet shoots with many different Cannon camera bodies and lenses.

When the waves are small he tethers his camera to his wrist. When they are bigger, he prefers to forgo the tether and just grip his equipment tightly.

“I would rather lose the camera, than have that thing tomahawking around me and hitting me in the head,” he said.

The camera’s waterproof housing though, means it floats. So he always manages to recover his equipment. “I have never lost a camera yet,” he said.

One of his aims is to capture the feel of surfing. One of the photographs depicts a big league surfer, Derek Dunfee, falling from a 35 to 40 ft wave.

“That was at a beach called Mavericks in California,” Mr de Roulet said. “This wave was moving so fast, he had such a hard time catching it that when he went to stand up, there was so much energy in the top of the wave that he fell and sent him flying through the air.”

In 2011, Mr de Roulet went to Tanzania to shoot digital commercial wildlife, and decided to bring a bag of film along.

He had not been doing a lot of film, by that point because most magazines no longer had a film photography budget. Digital is free, and a photographer can shoot endless amounts of it.

On that trip, Mr de Roulet got many great shots on digital, but when he got home his favourite image was one he took on black and white film.

That photo, “The Queen”, of a lioness standing under a scrubby tree in silhouette, is included in the BNG show. It inspired him to go back to his roots in film.

All of the photos in the BNG show were taken on Kodak T-MAX 3200, a unique type of black and white negative film which combines high film speeds with a large grain structure.

They are large format with some of them as big as 60in by 40in. The photos in the show were taken in places such as New Zealand, California and Bermuda.

Living in Bermuda, Mr de Roulet has been able to surf. He described the waves here as “fickle”, but said the island has a good group of surfers.

The BNG will hold a Sip and See, giving art lovers the chance to explore the show with Mr de Roulet, on February 27 at 5.30pm.

Bending Light: Photographs by Seth de Roulet is on in the Bermuda National Gallery’s main galleries at City Hall in Hamilton until September