Illawarra underwater photography enthusiast Mitch Scanlon-Bloor managed to capture the moment a great white shark took the fin of friend Callum Stewart as they swam off Wollongong’s Five Islands earlier this month.

The freedivers were trialling a waterproof camera housing manufactured by Illawarra engineer Matt Hipsley.

The accidental images came from a camera in the housing.

“Mitch was keen to demo test the housing, so I lent him a housing,” Mr Hipsley said.

“When Mitch called me it was about 10am, an hour after their encounter.

“He said, ‘oh, I’ve damaged your camera housing, I’ve scratched it up on the rocks trying to get out of the water’.

“I said, ‘don’t worry about that, as long as you guys are safe’ after hearing that story. 

“Later that afternoon they all came around to the workshop to drop the housing back.

“Mitch still had his camera loaded up inside the housing.

“It wasn’t until he was in the workshop and he was taking out the camera that he looked at the photos… It was a pretty good experience to be with the guys when they saw those shots for the first time. You saw them starting to get nervous about it again.”

Mr Hipsley, 29, who by day works for Shellharbour City Council as a project officer, designs customised waterproof housings for various cameras from his garage, sending designs to be milled out of solid ingots of aluminium (making them light but strong) before having them painted locally and then assembled in his home workshop at Fairy Meadow.

A long-time surf photography enthusiast, Mr Hipsley built his first ever camera housing at 14 years of age with the help of his father, fashioning it from plumbing supplies collected from a hardware store. 

He started the Salty Surf Housings business about two years ago.

He now builds five to ten camera housings per week. 

Housings are shipped to customers throughout Australia and internationally, including the US, Dubai and Sweden. Their sale price spans from $1000 to $10,000.  

Mr Hipsley has almost finished building a couple of housings for Hollywood-based camera manufacturer RED Digital Cinema.

“I’ve grown up in Wollongong and around the ocean... I first picked up a camera when I started studying photography at school, and it was just a natural progression to take the camera into the water,” he said. 

“It’s just a passion for engineering and building things, combined with a passion for photography kind of morphed into this business.”

READ MORE: Five Islands great white story goes worldwide