Laurent Ballesta is a French naturalist photographer of international renown. His last book, “700 sharks in the night”, ed. Andromeda Collection / 2018, represents the most successful photographic work of his career, in 222 photographs. It was after an expedition aimed at the observation of groupers in 2014, in the Polynesian atoll of Fakarava, that Laurent Ballesta made a parallel discovery. Realizing his dream of a 24h dive at 20 meters deep, he spends 12 hours at night in the pass. It is then that he becomes the witness of unsuspected behavior: the sharks, resting during the course of the day, descend to the bottom and gather to hunt at night. 700 gray reef sharks are then counted on the videos taken.

For photographing and filming, several image capture systems have been implemented including slow motion at 1000 frames per second. The adaptation to the aquatic environment of the bullet time shot method, with a 4m diameter circular arc ramp, including 32 cameras, has also been put in place. This ramp was piloted by two divers and allowed, for the first time, to freeze a scene underwater and to go around it at 180 °.