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Jonathan Kingston spent two years chasing a single photograph. He'd watched an old Jacques Cousteau
special in a pirated TV feed in Tamil Nadu, India — elephants swimming between the Andaman Islands, silhouetted against the sky — and he could see the image fully formed in his head before he'd ever set foot on the boat. He got to the airport, boarded the plane, landed, and found the official who'd given him permission was in jail for corruption. He went back home and started again.

That image is now one of his most iconic frames. It also tells you everything about how Jonathan Kingston works: patient, curious, obsessively committed to the story inside the picture. For over two decades, Jonathan has been a contributing photographer for National Geographic — not because he followed the conventional science-to-photography path, but because he burned his frequent-flyer miles on a last-minute flight to Hawaii to meet the editor-in-chief at a work camp on Molokai.

From a year living with the Crow Nation in Montana to excavating a 500-year-old fleet scuttled by Hernán Cortés off the Yucatán, from crocodile-infested shipwreck dives in Panama to a global lecture tour aboard a National Geographic plane — this is a conversation about what a life built around curiosity, craft, and relentless yes-saying actually looks like. 

Chapters
00:00 Swimming elephants — how one image takes two years
01:30 Welcome and introduction
04:00 From chemistry to a camera — early life and a dad who said no
10:00 A gap year on the Crow Reservation — where storytelling began
18:00 Brooks Institute of Photography and teaching in India
24:00 The Hawaii breakthrough — meeting National Geographic
30:00 First assignment — training journalists for a war zone
35:00 Underwater photography — skills and craft
39:00 Shipwreck diving in Panama — hunting Henry Morgan's fleet
44:00 The Cortés fleet — maritime archaeology off the Yucatán
49:00 Photography as storytelling — fitting multiple stories in one frame
52:30 The swimming elephant — a two-year image
55:00 Teaching, travelling and a new season of life
58:30 SACI — merging maritime archaeology with ocean conservation
01:00:30 Call to Adventure and Pay It Forward

What You'll Learn:
• How Jonathan failed freshman chemistry — in the department where his father was dean — to prove  a point, and why he still feels guilty about the teacher who had to deliver the grade
• Why the vast majority of National Geographic photographers started as scientists, not   photographers, and how Jonathan's backwards path eventually became his greatest asset
• The two-year odyssey behind the swimming-elephant photograph — from a pirated cable TV signal in  India to a dugout canoe on a remote Andaman island
• What a £20,000 underwater camera housing sent in a duct-taped Walmart cooler (with no padding) says about the culture of National Geographic photography
• How Jonathan's team developed a novel magnetometer survey technique to search for the 11 ships Hernán Cortés scuttled off Mexico in 1519 — and what they found
• Why pitching a story idea to National Geographic sometimes means handing it to someone else — and why Jonathan now believes the law of the jungle does, eventually, work in your favour

JONATHAN KINGSTON | National Geographic Contributing Photographer
Website: jonathankingston.com
Instagram: @jonathankingston
National Geographic profile: nationalgeographic.com/expeditions/experts/jonathan-kingston
Pay It Forward: Submerged Archaeological Conservancy International (SACI) — saci.org

ABOUT JONATHAN KINGSTON
Jonathan Kingston is a National Geographic contributing photographer and founding board member of the Submerged Archaeological Conservancy International. His work bridges science, exploration, and storytelling — spanning maritime archaeology, natural history, and cultural photography across more
than two decades. He trained at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, taught at Light and Life Academy in Tamil Nadu, India, sailed the world with Semester at Sea, and broke into National Geographic via a last-minute flight to Molokai on cashed-in frequent-flyer miles. He is currently based in the United States and photographs for National Geographic Expeditions, shoots
personal long-term documentary projects, and leads photography workshops.

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