But his pictures – evidence of time spent in the habitat of some rather intimidating and territorial sea creatures – tell a different story.

Smith’s workplace, as often as possible, is quite literally the octopus’s garden.

And while most of us would turn and swim away if we spotted some of his subjects, Smith actively seeks them out.

The Stanwell Park-based photographer isn’t one to ignore the hazards of his chosen workplace; instead he does his best to think and plan his way through the risk.

That’s the only way to handle it when you’re sharing the water with sharks, crocodiles or bluebottles. Freedom here is not being blissfully ignorant – it’s understanding the environment and how to survive.

Glance at the pictures opposite and it’s hard to believe he was not in a cage when encountering that saltwater crocodile off the coast of Cuba. But listen to him tell the tale and he clearly takes precautions.

But, Weekender asks, does he ever get scared? Smith takes a long pause.

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“Not really,” he says eventually. “Sometimes you get the spooks – if you’re in deep water and the visibility’s not good, I have found myself checking over my shoulder a few times and getting a bit spooked. But I’ve never found myself terrified, or petrified.

“I’ve never had reason to get out of the water, to stop what I’m doing. Really, it’s your own mind that would stop you from doing what you’re doing.

“That American crocodile … that was a memorable moment, you could say. I swam up to him, put the camera up to his nose, too a few shots.”

But it was well planned, with local knowledge of the animals and how they behave.

“The American saltwater croc is not as aggressive as Aussie ones,” Smith says. “They’re still not to be messed with, but it’s a well-prepared, well researched affair.

“It’s not like we just jump in the water and start looking for crocs with reckless abandon. You’ve got to find the croc in the right spot, you’ve got to have brilliantly clear water, so you can only really do it at high tide.

“They’re ambush predators, so if you’re in dirty, silty water, they’ll hide in that and that’s when you’re in real danger.

“But if they’re out sunbathing in 2-3m of crystal clear water, they’re more scared of you. If you swim over to them they’ll start backing off.

“It’s well thought out and there’s a lot of training involved. Certainly most of the time I would not get in the water with a crocodile. I only did it because I was confident it was OK to do so at the time.”

Kids, don’t try that at home.

As it is, Smith’s fascination with the underwater world came young. Growing up as a boy in Nottinghamshire, England, he would visit the Mediterranean with his family, and once he started snorkelling in Spain he was “done”. The sea had taken him – and like a true photographer it was as much the light as it was the life.

“Some of my earliest memories are of my brother and I snorkelling on family holidays to France and the Mediterranean Sea,” he remembers.

“I can clearly remember my first experience of watching shafts of sunlight weave and dance down into the deep blue, carved by the rippling ocean surface.”

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Years later when backpacking around Australia he saw the underwater photography opportunities this magnificent coast offers, and would later emigrate here for that very reason. His current fascination is cephalopods – octopus, squid and cuttlefish – and he recently returned from a shooting trip off Whyalla, SA, where thousands of giant cuttlefish gather to breed.

“Fish and seahorses and these other nice things are beautifiul to photograph but they act instinctively all the time, swim away from you or hide – whereas the big cuttlefish and octopus, they tend to come towards you and are really interested. They’ll hover around, look at you and react to your movements. They interact with you and there’s definitely an intelligence there.” 

At Whyalla the Spencer Gulf was transformed into an underwater nightclub.

“With the cuttlefish, the colour changes are phenomenal – they’re like living rainbows,” he says. “The blues, the reds, the purples ... they’re constantly humming all these different colours and showing off to each other, fighting for mating rights.

“The guys are all hanging around doing these standoffs and colour changes, trying to impress the ladies. There’s little pockets of activity everywhere – you’ll see them inking, and fighting, wrestling around, mating.”

Whether it’s escapism or art that drives Smith, it’s paying off. He has won significant awards including Australian Geographic’s nature photographer of the year for animal behaviour in 2016 – which helps determine his approach to post-production.

“It’s always kept to a minimum, because I shoot with a mind to being published in nature magazine … and also I shoot for competitions,” he says. “And all those people who publish those kind of pictures require raw file verification, which means you can’t go to town with post-processing.

“A lot of the pictures I take may have alterations to (colour) saturation and contrast, but that’s it. There’s no cloning, nothing added or taken away, no layering.”

Instead, light and effort are the tools.

“The turtle shots, I was a week in Papua New Guinea and probably came back with three good shots. I was over there to shoot the hatching of those turtles. That turtle (is) about 3cm long, and about two minutes old. It’s just hatched, and ran down with 140 of his mates, and I was in the sea waiting.

“It’s a really crazy shoot because you’re there for days waiting for the hatch to take place, then they all come past in two minutes. That particular shoot timed in really nicely with the light: the sun was hitting the horizon as it all kicked off. It was a hectic two minutes, shoot shoot shoot … it doesn’t get any better than that.”

Smith has also turned his skills to teaching, holding underwater photography “boot camps”, including a tutorial trip to the Solomon Islands next year.

To see more of Smith’s photography or information about the trips, visit www.mattysmithphoto.com