Evans Baudin/Scuba Diving magazine
Grand Prize Winner: Evans Baudin's photo of a whale shark giving a friendly ride to some suckerfish won the top prize in Scuba Diving magazine's 2020 Through Your Lens underwater photography contest.
Jeffrey Haines/Scuba Diving magazine
Macro: Top prize in this category went to Jeffrey Haines, for this photo of a seahorse. "You never know what you are going to find when you go on a black-water dive," he says.
Jules Casey/Scuba Diving magazine
Behavior: "I'm not sure if the seahorse mistakenly grabbed hold of the pipefish with its tail, confusing it for a piece of weed, or if this was deliberate," says winner Jules Casey.
Martin Strmiska/Scuba Diving magazine
Wide-Angle: "On the surface at the cenote's entrance, I had no idea what sort of space lay beneath the small pool. Only when I descended and positioned myself outside the area lit up by sun was the dark space revealed," says winner Martin Strmiska.
Tobias Friedrich/Scuba Diving magazine
Compact Camera: "This juvenile wonderpus was sitting on a palm leaf, a very nice subject to be tested," says winner Tobias Friedrich.
CNN  — 

Don’t worry. Those suckerfish are just hitching a ride in that whale shark’s mouth.

This incredible image scooped the Grand Prize in Scuba Diving magazine’s 2020 Underwater Photo Contest, an annual competition celebrating the finest photography captured across the seven seas.

The Through Your Lens competition, now in its 16th year, attracted 2,636 entries from around the world.

Evans Baudin, of Baja California, Mexico, grabbed the winning shot while on an expedition in June 2020 to document marine life and the effects of reduced marine traffic due to Covid-19.

There are four contest categories, with the top prize in the Behavior set going to Australian Jules Casey’s of a pipefish tussling with a shorthead seahorse in Victoria’s Port Phillip Bay.

“This interaction lasted only about 10 seconds, which was just enough time to set up the shot,” says Casey.

Jeffrey Haines/Scuba Diving magazine
Jeffrey Haines' award-winning seahorse image.

A seahorse also proved lucky for Jeffrey Haines, of West Palm Beach, Florida, who won the Macro category with his image of one of the tiny marine-dwellers in a clump of sargassum.

“Persistence and concentration are the keys to success in finding your subject as you drift along,” says Haines.

Tobias Friedrich of Anilao, Philippines, won the Compact Camera category thanks to a colorful shot of a juvenile wonderpus resting on a palm leaf.

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“As a SeaLife camera brand ambassador I always have a DC2000 with me, in addition to my DSLR setup, to take a few side shots,” he says.

A moody picture of a diver descending into the black depths of a sinkhole in Puerto Morelos, Mexico won the Wide Angle category.

“My buddy, hanging above that cloud and lit by sun rays, appeared so small that I spent the whole dive shooting from distance, trying to capture the tiny diver in that huge space,” says photographer Martin Strmiska.

Entries will be accepted for the 2021 Through Your Lens competition from November 1.