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Dr. Dirk Schmidt's passion for sharks started at an early age. At age 16 he started compiling his own shark dossier of over 500 pages, detailing hundreds of sharks, their behavior, habitats and shark attacks. As a qualified dive master, he started freediving with sharks long before it become fashionable. Realising that sharks were not the mindless killers portrayed and sensationalized at the time, he spent many hours in the presence of large sharks off the KwaZulu-Natal coast. His love for these magnificent creatures culminated in his first groundbreaking and world-first book depicting breaching Great White sharks in the False Bay area, where he captured images of these magnificent creatures becoming airborne in pursuit of their prey. He hopes to extent his research into the field of Great White behaviour, so that humankind may better understand this complex and enigmatic predator in order to conserve this and other shark species. Dirk lives with his wife Jenny in Simon’s Town South Africa, located on the southern Cape Peninsula in False Bay. .