Marco Chang — affectionately nicknamed "Gold Medal Brother" (a playful jab at his love of Gold Medal beer) — is one of Taiwan's most decorated competitors on the international underwater photography circuit in recent years. Through dive trips that have taken him and his camera to countries around the world, he has rediscovered why he dives and deepened his commitment to his underwater photography philosophy. Marco freely shares his techniques and ideas with anyone who will listen, driven by a single hope: that more people in Taiwan will take up underwater photography and let the public see the beauty that lies beneath the surface.
Marco has been diving for about ten years and has been shooting underwater for roughly eight of those. The spark that first drew him to diving came at a crossroads in his life. Just turned 26, he had recently left a job when a friend who was volunteering at the Blue Earth Foundation on Orchid Island kept sending him stunning photos of the island. Those images moved something deep inside him. After much deliberation, he decided to work in exchange for accommodation at a restaurant on Orchid Island. He still remembers spending every spare moment either snorkeling underwater or circling the island in search of undiscovered snorkeling spots. On one occasion, in the waters just outside the nuclear waste storage facility — an area with powerful currents that the local Tao people also advise against entering — he caught a glimpse of a rainbow-colored moray eel. At that moment, a seed was quietly planted in his heart: a desire to share everything he witnessed beneath the waves.
Marco hopes to show the world the beauty of the ocean through his camera
Marco Chang's Journey into Underwater Photography
After his brief work-exchange stay, Marco returned to Taipei in August of the same year and, without a second thought, walked straight into a dive shop and signed up for a beginner scuba diving course. A natural in the water, he sailed through the training with few hiccups — aside from an early stumble when the unfamiliar weight of a scuba tank threw off his balance and sent him tumbling into an abalone pond. Once he had completed the course without further incident, memories of the moray eel he had seen on Orchid Island came flooding back, and his underwater photography journey began.
Marco had always worked in visual design, so photography was already part of his professional life — not just technical competence, but an eye for aesthetics. Even so, he started out with zero knowledge of underwater photography, naively assuming that all he needed to do was keep the seawater off his camera. He bought a cheap plastic waterproof bag, stuffed his Sony point-and-shoot inside, and took it diving. Within fewer than ten dives, the bag began to leak. He watched helplessly underwater as water seeped in. After surfacing that day, he threw himself into researching what it really took to shoot underwater — and from that point on, the cameras he took beneath the surface grew steadily bigger, more advanced, and more professional.
Gradually, Marco's photography matured. One day, a senior photographer said to him half-jokingly, "That photo is great — why aren't you entering competitions?" Without overthinking it, Marco submitted the shot. The underdog entry went on to win first place, and just like that, his competitive underwater photography career was born. As Marco's profile grew on the international underwater photography scene, the experience that has stayed with him most vividly is a trip to Papua New Guinea — often called the "Amazon of Asia" — a vast, biodiversity-rich tropical Pacific island nation at the far eastern edge of Indonesia. Its underwater world, largely untouched by human development, retains a primordial quality unlike anywhere else on earth. Even before he arrived, Marco was intrigued: on one of his connecting flights, he noticed that the bicep of the indigenous man seated next to him was roughly the size of his own face.
Unable to follow the English-language dive briefing, Marco descended with only a vague idea of what to expect — and was immediately stopped in his tracks by gorgonian sea fans three to four meters across. Schools of fish, dense coral formations, and congregating sharks filled his field of vision. From that moment, his resolve was absolute: he would dedicate himself to capturing what he saw before him and sharing it with as many people as possible.
Papua New Guinea's pristine ecosystem and its warm-hearted people
Awe-inspiring giant sea fans and the underwater ecosystem that surrounds them
Along his underwater photography path, Marco has accumulated some experiences that set him apart. He has been invited to serve on the organizing teams of several international underwater photography competitions, giving him rare insight into what judges look for in a winning image and the many standards that must be upheld to run a world-class competition. In the years ahead, Marco will undoubtedly continue sharing everything he sees and learns in the underwater photography world.
Competing in an international underwater photography competition abroad
Behind the scenes of a ShootOut judging session
Taiwan's Seas Are Still His Favorite
Marco has traveled the world and witnessed extraordinary marine environments, yet Taiwan's seas remain closest to his heart — along with his belief that Taiwan still has a great deal of room to improve. He often brings up Indonesia, a country he visits frequently, where the government takes a firm and consistent stance on marine conservation. In recent years, the Indonesian government has made headlines for deliberately sinking illegal Chinese fishing vessels as a statement of intent — a decisive exercise of law enforcement power in the name of ocean protection that feels almost unimaginable in today's populist political climate in Taiwan. He also points to the example of Xiaoliuqiu: in 2015, the island was facing a severe fisheries collapse, the result of rampant overfishing that had left its waters virtually empty.
In response, the local fishermen's association took matters into its own hands and instituted a voluntary net-fishing ban. A few years later, Xiaoliuqiu had become one of the world's premier sea turtle aggregation sites, its underwater ecosystem steadily recovering. The knock-on effect has been a steady stream of visitors and tourism revenue. Many of the island's older fishermen have since abandoned the higher-risk offshore fishing industry and turned instead to running guesthouses or taking divers out on boat dives. Beyond Xiaoliuqiu, however, the only other relatively successful marine protected area in Taiwan in recent years has been the Chao-Ching Wang-Hai Bay Conservation Area in Keelung. Elsewhere, marine protected areas continue to be caught in a tug-of-war with fishermen and anglers. Marco can only stay optimistic, figuring that perhaps other waters will have to reach the same state of collapse that Xiaoliuqiu once faced before the painful lesson is truly learned and lasting change is made.
Xiaoliuqiu's thriving sea turtle population
He believes that both the Taiwanese government and its people need to cultivate an ocean mindset. For example, he long wondered why the Philippines, Japan, and even Green Island had documented sightings of the adorable pygmy seahorse, while Taiwan's Northeast Coast — sitting squarely on the Pacific island chain — had none on record. So when he discovered a pygmy seahorse on the Northeast Coast for the first time, he was elated and eager to see the government take meaningful action. As with so many other cases, though, his hopes fell on deaf ears. Compare this to Manado in Indonesia, which immediately established a protected zone upon discovering pygmy seahorses there. Today, Manado draws enormous numbers of international dive tourists every year, generating remarkable economic value from dive travel and its associated industries.
An incredibly cute pygmy seahorse, no bigger than a grain of rice
Bringing the conversation back to Taiwan, it is worth noting that the island's underwater ecosystems are genuinely rich. Positioned at the confluence of the Kuroshio Current and the China Coastal Current, Taiwan boasts highly varied underwater topography. The 82.5 site on the Northeast Coast, where Marco dives regularly, is home to an impressive diversity of macro life — including the red Irish lord scorpionfish and various nudibranch species such as the so-called "mushroom polka dot" — that has left foreign diving friends genuinely puzzled. After diving that spot, several of them have turned to Marco and asked: if you can see this many macro species at a single dive site, why isn't Taiwan developing dive tourism more seriously? Perhaps that question cuts to the heart of his belief that Taiwanese society needs an ocean mindset. When we treat the sea as something that doesn't matter — dumping rubbish into it, relentlessly reclaiming it for land, building fishing ports no one uses, deploying tetrapod seawall policies that serve no real purpose — we do nothing but cut Taiwan's people off from their ocean. The first step toward making people care about the sea is helping them discover it anew. Marco believes that every time he presses the shutter, he is scattering that seed a little further.
Marco is also skilled in underwater portrait photography
A classic Northeast Coast resident — the bigfin reef squid
One of the Northeast Coast's star creatures, nicknamed "Pikachu"
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