(upbeat ambient music) - [Jane] Imagine the power of still photographic images, moments frozen in time that can change the way we perceive our place in the world.

To the Ends of the Earth isn't a new concept, it began when people first started looking beyond the next ridge, the next valley, to the lands beyond the mountains, they searched for the unknown, the unexpected, the surprising, to map, catalog and show to others, each explorer searched in their own way to push boundaries expanding and sharing knowledge of what existed in the great beyond.

Here you will see through a photographic vision a story for The Ends of the Earth, photographs by Todd Gustavson, a lifelong personal search for the dramatically unexpected.

Traveling the world for decades, capturing intimate natural history moments and dramatic wildlife action, Todd has brought to the viewer images from East Africa, Brazil, Namibia, Patagonia, Rwanda, the Galapagos Islands, India, Costa Rica, Madagascar and the ocean realm revealing common threads that exist between humanity and the natural world that forever bind our faiths together.

Ancient map makers could only present what they knew, beyond the edge of the map was the unknown inhabited by monsters and dragons, Todd still pursues dragons in his personal search for the ends of the earth.

Through Todd's lens, we see a vanishing natural world, we can see a world we have the power to protect, we have a collective voice that can change the cause of destruction to one of stability and rebirth, to the ends of the earth is more than a magnificent collection of wildlife photos, Todd's photographs allow us to experience vicariously the very behaviors people most want to see.

- [Todd] We live on the water planet.

A world that is 70% covered by water and the oceans hold about 96% of that water, indispensable water that maintains global climate and provides life giving precipitation that sustains all living things.

The very reason I'm a photographer and traveled the world documenting the Earth's beauty is because my biology-, zoology-trained dad took our family to Tanganyika's Indian ocean beaches, when he had time off from teaching.

There was a string of beaches I remember vividly.

Tanga Beach Club, Kigombe Beach and Pangani, I remember swimming in the waves with my brother and sister but most of all there was dad pacing the beach head down at low tide looking for seashells.

He dug in the sand, turned over rocks, explored tide pools and followed shell trails in the quiet shallows, there he showed me how different shells lived in lagoons, tide pools, mud flats and sand banks of the Indian Ocean.

Coronata shells leave a classic trail when they prowl the tidal flats for nutrients, when the tide changes they bury themselves till the next low tide.

Mollusks have different diets which determine what style of locomotion each species evolves, conchs have an amazing foot with a stylized operculum or trapped door that allows them to vault across mud flats, they also have eye stalks that give them a wide angle of view.

Another unique form of locomotion is employed by janthina snails, they're pelagic, meaning they live in the open ocean kept afloat by secreting from its foot a frothy liquid that hardens on contact with seawater into a raft of bubbles, this one has a colony of tag along barnacles that filter ocean water as the shell travels the sea.

A classic Indo-Pacific shell is the Gold-ringer Cowry, they're herbivores that feast on sea grasses and are commonly found empty on the beach.

While the shell itself is beautiful, a living animal is much more intriguing, what you see here is the living mantle that covers the glossy shell, this thin membrane secretes calcium and creates that shell.

This amazing creature is a nudibranch, a shell-less molluscs that searches the coral reefs for food, when they eat stinging corals, the poison is stored in the feathery projections on its back, this makes him unpalatable for other predators.

The gelatinous spiral of a nudibranch egg mass is a work of art.

I think my favorite sea creature may be the sea hair.

There are many different species but I love the patterns on this one, look at the surface and the electric blue dots.

Here are some seashells found on a low tide reef where there are no tourists.

Seashells are abundant and in this ocean documentary I will suggest that people look at them, enjoy them and leave them on the beach and in the tide pools where hermit crabs can use them as a home.

With over 70% of this earth covered by oceans it becomes a real issue to try and find the spot that you think would tell the story that's beneath the water.

Here in the Maldives, we have a lot of the the elements that we need to tell that story, we have tropical atolls, we have lagoons, we have open ocean, we have really good access and the life that is here, the beautiful Indo-Pacific life includes whale sharks, it includes manta rays, it's got powder blue tangs and sea anemone and clownfish, and turtles, and eels, and octopus, it has the whole story.

There are beautiful areas of untouched undamaged reef that have beauty for as far as you can swim as far as you can see and even parts that were damaged during El Nino, they're showing new growth, so there's new coral and it's marked by sort of a bluish tinge as the new coral is growing where the old ones were.

The Maldives are one of the classic places in the planet to see whale sharks and one of our goals, whale sharks, after searching this vast ocean, there was a whale shark.

We jumped into the water and I actually bit through the mouthpiece of my snorkel, it was such an amazing surprise.

Following whale sharks is extraordinarily difficult with one swish of their tail can be a hundred meters farther from you than they were, so it's not good to follow them trying to get in front of them and just wait or finding a turn where you might be in front of them after that turn, that's the key.

And then the question is, do you follow them as they go or do you just stay still and let them move through the frame with their great girth in the swish of that tail?

As a safari photographer I am used to grabbing my equipment pushing the button that I know is gonna make a difference in the shot, whether it's making it brighter or darker or the focus or any number of adjustments I could make.

Underwater there are housings that hold the same camera and they have buttons that will control all of those functions in theory, but when a whale shark or a manta ray is swimming at seemingly a hundred miles an hour, it's difficult to find exactly the right button to make that thing happen, so that's a real challenge.

We're using an underwater housing for our on land cameras, so we're using a fisheye lens to get wide, whale sharks are big, so wide angle is good, that wide angle fits into a domed port that makes all of the focus underwater very, very sharp, here's the back panel allowing us to access all of the buttons and functions of the camera.

Right now, I'm using this fan to make sure everything is dry and cool for the next time we go into the water with this housing.

When filming whale sharks it's different than photographing whale sharks, if you point the camera at a whale shark that's underwater and you take a picture, either get it all in the frame or you don't, but when you're filming, you're trying to tell a story of the girth or the power or the size, the shape, the texture of this whale shark.

So as the whale shark turned and I was filming he came directly under me, it was a question, do I try to paddle and keep up knowing that I can't?

Or I filmed the head and held my position as he went underneath the camera, the entire length of his 20 foot body till the tail did its last swish, I knew I was in.

I know a lot of people think that in order to film or photograph underwater you have to dive and I can see the merits of diving, you can stay down longer and you can be a little bit more still.

However, I don't dive, I snorkel, so everything you see in this footage will be from snorkeling, I feel you have the best access and the best light on that first 10 feet of water.

A classic Pacific character in our story would be the giant clam, so when you say giant clam and you see a little clam two inches long with a little wavy colorful lip, you think wow, that's pretty and you get a nice shot, then you find one that's maybe 10 inches.

Then you find one that's 16 inches, every single one of them having a different color from blue, to beige, to green, to black, to turquoise with stripes and spots, they are amazing and what about sea stars in their varied colors, shapes and textures.

Turtles are cool, here we have hawksbill turtles, we swam with three or four individuals simply observing them as they pick through the seaweeds and grasses for nutrients.

They come to the surface to breathe, sometimes they're at the surface simply to breathe, other times they're sighting or smelling to see where they are and where they want to be, my favorite shots are not when they're on the bottom, there's a lot of rubble and old growth coral that makes distracting textures, but when they come up for a breath and they have the deep blue of the great behind behind them, that's what I like.

As with all photography, underwater photography is storytelling, you can take a picture of a fish, it can be sharp, it can be in the middle of the frame, it can be perfectly in focus but if it's not doing anything, it's not a story.

There's a picture of a parrot fish, it's pretty, the colors are dramatic.

However, if there's a cleaner wrasse who's working on that fish and if that fish were to twist and turn toward the camera showing its teeth with which it creates all of the sand in the ocean, that's a story.

In India, there is a syndrome called tiger fever, it's just what I call it, if I haven't seen a tiger within the last 20 minutes there's something wrong and I get jumpy, gotta have tigers.

If you miss tigers for a day, it's a thing, if it's two days, it's a tragedy.

Now in the ocean, in this vast limitless space of ocean, we were looking for manta rays, that was our goal, that was our quest, we needed to be strong.

We didn't find manta rays and it was a hard thing, it was really difficult, so we've tried the next day thinking we're never gonna find manta rays, this is crazy, we tried once, we're not gonna do it.

There they were, we got in the water, there were six manta rays on a fairly shallow lagoon, it was 40 feet.

But wow, when you saw six manta rays swimming and going in circles around each other and doing these social behaviors that they do, heart stopping and it was as if we had scored a victory.

As on land photographing underwater at eye level gives the subject more power and resonates more with the viewer.

This Indian bulb anemone is right at eye level and brings us into the striped clownfish's world, they stay safe inside the poisonous tentacles by developing a resistance to that anemone's poison and covering themselves with it as they swim and nestle in the tentacles, these photos further illustrate that point.

Needless to say, underwater we are not in a vehicle as we are on safari.

If the cheetahs are here, we want to move to here and we can get the shot we need.

If we're underwater, this just in, fish can really move quickly and if you look like you're chasing them they'll continually move away from you, I find that if there's subject matter in this area, there's dramatic fish, there's pretty stuff.

Just wait, let them do what they're gonna do and pretty soon you'll have fish that are looking in your direction fish that are absolutely parallel with your lens, you'll have some beautiful behaviors that you won't get if you're chasing.

What I truly love about the tropical atoll that we are on is it's surrounded by a golden beach and right at that shoreline in the Golden Beach are small fry, there are millions and millions of tiny fish in schools all around the island.

They support gray herons that come and fish, they support the reef fish that come in and and try and catch a meal.

Even sharks, so black tip sharks at first light come through the shallows and you can see the fish just they make us split as that shark comes through and when the bully boys from the ocean come in, there was one moment that I will never forget, thousands and thousands of fish jumping three or four feet out of the water in a 50 foot wave as the shark was trying to eat.

You can't really talk about oceans without looking at waves.

These amazing phenomenon are the result of water molecules traveling in circles via kinetic energy.

The water of the ocean isn't moving much.

It's energy traveling through the water that is in motion, the more energy, the bigger the wave, columns of water are affected by the orbital energy.

As the wave approaches the shore, the column is compressed against the ocean floor causing the wave to rise up and eventually crest and collapse.

Stingrays patrol the sand flats of the Caribbean.

In Grand Cayman, we have a species of stingray called the Southern Stingray and they grow especially big in the North Sound where there's plenty of squid to eat.

And they're looking for squid, they're also looking for murex shells or bivalves to crush with their bite plates, so sometimes if you'll see stingrays clustering somebody's found something to eat and other ones want that food.

Underwater, as on land, light, direction and quality are crucial, you can see this in two different shots of stingrays, one is with soft muted light on a cloudy morning.

Another is bright sparkly light that's coming through and creating dappled patterns on the stingrays, I feel it's a little harsh.

The last day was early morning soft light, soft dappling and really highlighted sting rings, you'll see the difference.

So when we got in the water with the stingrays I realized that the light angle was really important, if we became really focused on the species of stingray, stingray is what we need to get, it didn't matter what they were on we were just gonna get stingray, we realized that the pictures weren't all that good, the film wasn't all that spectacular, what were the stingrays doing and where were they doing it?

Was it shallow water?

Was it clear water?

Was it a clean white sandy ocean bottom with a clear ocean top?

Or maybe there was a spray of sea grass behind them that added some depth and dimension.

Were they swooping?

Were they in groups or were they just a cluster of thins and tails?

It all makes a difference in the final picture of the sting ring.

After the experience of day one and day two, I knew what to pre-visualize for day three, I wanted some of the grass flats along with the sand, I wanted the stingrays spinning into the shot, not as static going across the frame, spinning into the shot and having the small reef jacks, having these silver fish right under them was cool too.

When you are looking for turtles, you may find turtles, if you don't find turtles, there's always something else, today we had cuttlefish.

We had conch shells.

We had beautiful flounder scooting amongst the sea grass onto rocks and changing colors along the way.

Shallow Caribbean waters produce tons of sea life, dramatic things like turtles, tiny things like seashells or sea fans, my favorite seashell might be the flamingo tub.

Coral life in the Caribbean is completely different, than coral life in the Indo-Pacific region, here we have brain corals for hard corals, we have Elkhorn corals, stag horn corals for the hard corals, but the predominant things you'll see on the reef the textural beauty of the reef is created by gorgonians, sea whips and sea fans that come in a multitude of colors, cream, brown, blue, purple, yellow, orange all creating a tapestry in this Caribbean reef.

Photographing and filming one sea fan or one beautiful gorgonian has its place, but when you have the gorgonian stacked up and mixed with sea fans and sea whips to create that tapestry of color and texture as they wave in the current together, it's almost like a symphony of textures.

Just because you have found a sea turtle doesn't mean you're gonna get spectacular film or pictures of a sea turtle, everything is dependent on the activity the light and the angle of view.

What are they doing?

Are they swimming?

Are they breathing?

Are they feeding?

If they're feeding, are they feeding away from you or are they feeding slightly towards you so that you see the entire texture of the shell the beautiful flippers and their mouths chomping on the sea grass.

This morning I found a sea mount in the middle of a lagoon, sand and eelgrass, as far as you can see and one coral head that came up in a beautiful cone shape.

I got enamored with the fish that were in there for protection, the snappers and groupers and some of the little tiny squirrel fish, they're all kind of gravitating toward that sea mount for protection, so I went for the fish.

I realized that's not the story, the story is the entire biosphere of the sea floor going to the sea mount, the surface of the water and then all of the fish surrounding it, that's the shot.

(upbeat ambient music) Here's our chance to enjoy some of the heroes from the ocean realm.

One of the issues with all of the global coral reefs is die off and it's bleaching and it is global warming and changing in the temperatures of the oceans.

- [Jane] And think how these wild creatures have so much in common with each other and with us.

Through Todd's lens, we see a vanishing natural world, we can see a world we have the power to protect, if we of all preachers can best understand consequences and plan far ahead, then let us do so.

- [Todd] I choose to use my photography to stand with nature, our delicate planet and the wildlife that is shown in this documentary - [Jane] To the Ends of the Earth is sharing the earth's beauty to illustrate exactly what is at stake.

- [Todd] Imagine a world without coral reefs, turtles, whales, stingrays and those are just the obvious animals at risk.

- [Jane] Collectively, these photographs explore different aspects of the animal's behavior, a visual commentary on what it means to be born free into the last wild places.