M egan Hemsworth has
M egan Hemsworth has such a deep and passionate connection with the sea, you could easily imagine that saltwater runs through her veins. Hers is a life ruled by oceanography – tidal currents, daylight hours, weather systems and wetsuits. But even someone with Hemsworth’s deepocean experience can face challenges so extreme that they steal the air from your lungs. Clad head-to-toe in neoprene, she’s clinging to the black rocks of the Icelandic FRDVWEXIIHWHGE\WKHZKLWHVSUD\WKDWƓOOV the air around her. In a moment she will launch herself into the freezing sea, a sea that can kill in minutes without protection, in an effort to capture that most precious of things – a moment of beauty. Twenty-three-year-old Hemsworth is a specialist photographer with a unique relationship to water. She doesn’t just take pictures of activities happening on the water or photograph under the water. Instead, she takes herself into the sea – just her and her camera – to explore the interplay between the sea and the sky, the contrast between the energy and the calm. She’s travelled the world to capture surfers off coasts from Albania to Costa Rica. Her work has seen her spend hours with her camera strapped to her left wrist whilst she treads water, watching and waiting for that perfect wave, that perfect shot of surfer and sea working together as one. “The sea has always been where I’ve felt at home. I can’t go more than a few days away from the water, even now,” explained Hemsworth earlier on the way to the coast. “I need to see the sea, to be in it, to swim in it and feel the water against me. It’s what relaxes me and stimulates my mind.” Hemsworth combined her love of water with her love of photography three years ago when she completed a project which featured a ballet dancer photographed underwater. From there she decided to use the same technique to shoot surfers in the sea off the coast of her beloved Cornwall. The images she captured from being in the ocean were so true to the relationship between surfer and sea that she started to build a following LQWKHVXUƓQJFRPPXQLWKDWDFFODLPWKHQ started to grow on social media. Soon, she was being booked to take on underwater jobs all over the world. Iceland, one of the wildest and most dangerous places to surf, has always been high on Hemsworth’s bucket list of locations to shoot. The Nordic surf community is small and Icelanders have been raised to keep a respectful distance from a capricious sea. Land Rover is supporting Hemsworth’s quest on this trip by providing a new Defender, ready to take on anything the ODQGRIƓUHDQGLFHFDQWKURZDWLWŏ,ōPIURP a Land Rover family,” she says. “Growing up, I lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere in the Cotswolds. We really needed our Land Rovers to deal with the mud and the snow.” The Defender, right at home on the Icelandic coast, enables photographer Megan Hemsworth to push her limits 45