Plenty of divers fantasize about throwing off our “real lives” and dedicating ourselves fulltime to our underwater passion.

Greg Lecoeur actually did it — selling his company, car and boat and hitting the road for a year with just his backpack and camera — and the results have paid off. This week an image by the French photographer was named National Geographic Nature Photograph of the Year, spotlighting a photo that will be familiar to Scuba Diving readers: It took 3rd-place honors in the Wide-Angle category in our 2016 “Through Your Lens” photo contest, an annual competition for both amateurs and pros. (The 2017 contest will open soon; enter your images here starting in January.)

Lecoeur’s work has appeared in Scuba Diving more than two dozen times since 2015; he also is a frequent contributor to our sister magazine Sport Diver.

As photo editor of Scuba Diving, Kristen McClarty quickly becomes aware of standout talent in the underwater photography community, especially when “someone enters this very professional group of photographers and makes the ordinary extraordinary,” says McClarty.

“Greg Lecoeur did that from the moment we were introduced to him in 2014. His images are slick, sophisticated and surprising,” says McClarty. “His take on freediving, sharks and feeding aggregations — Kona’s manta night dive, South Africa’s Sardine Run, blacktips in Tahiti, sharks in the Bahamas, crocodiles in Mexico — is refreshing to say the very least. We always look forward to his dispatches.”

Stand-out Lecoeur images in Scuba Diving include our July 2016 cover of a grinning great white and of course the Sardine Run image of Cape gannets and dolphins that brought him acclaim from both Scuba Diving and National Geographic.

“My life is discovering things underwater,” Lecoeur told National Geographic after his big win. “I ran a company, but I was working every day. I had money, but I didn’t have time to play in the sea.”

He gave all that up and began publishing in dive magazines; for the last three or four years he’s “been doing only diving, spending all my time in water and with nature,” he told Nat Geo.

“I am also very happy because an underwater photograph won the National Geographic contest,” Lecoeur says.

“We are trying to find other planets, but we have only explored maybe 10 or 20 percent of the world’s oceans. The marine world is full of life, but it is difficult to access for most of the world,” he told Nat Geo. “It is very important to me to share my world, to share what I see with my lens.”