Jeffrey Milisen knew he was seeing something more strange than usual on a night dive last year in the Pacific Ocean, a few miles off of the Big Island of Hawaii, when he snapped photos of a larval cusk eel.

His photo of the etherial fish, shot at about 40 feet depth, has won top honors in the 2015 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Competition. Time Magazine calls it one of the most prestigious underwater photo contests in the world, known for its annual picks of captivating and rarely seen images of mysterious marine life. Winners of the annual competition were announced earlier this month.

Milisen, a graduate of Ledyard High School, is a marine biologist and dive master with Kona Honu Divers in Kona. He also has made quite a splash as a deep sea photographer. His photos and blog posts of dives are on his website, milisenphotography.yolasite.com, and on konahonudivers.com.

“I have always walked a fine balance between purse scientist and photographer,” says Milisen, whose rapid-fire explanations are a patois of enthusiastic awe and scientific accuracy. “The best time to see the open ocean community is in the middle of the night, when deep-water hunters come to the surface to feed on the plethora of animals. In blackwater dives, we jump in over 5,000 feet of water at night. I was really stoked to see this animal, a Lamprogrammmus sp. This larval form had never been seen in situ before.”

The shimmery blue fish, the sole one of its kind that Milisen spotted that night, was about five inches long. Although he has been doing deep dark water dives for years, he and fellow divers had never seen this animal before.

“Larval fish — or fish in their larval stage — have all sorts of strange adaptations,” he said. “They tend to be perfectly clear so they blend in and disappear from predators. They have these extravagant adaptions that will disappear as they mature, long beak noses, frilly bits hanging off, some have external stomachs. This one had all of these flamboyant features.”

Milisen, who likes to dive without a boat tether so he can follow an exotic specimen and get to know it, pursued it with his underwater camera, a Canon T1i (500D). The camera set-up, including Ikelite strobes and two Sola 2000 lumen focus lights, weighs about 30 pounds and is about three feet across when the strobe lights are extended.

It’s one thing to find the weird fish, which may have a muted bioluminescence, in the dark and another matter to light it and to get the photo. This isn’t the first photography award for Milisen, who also won the Macro category of the Ocean Art Underwater competition last year. But the beauty of this photo and the rarity of this fish have catapulted him into diving photography celebrity status. His photo has been featured on the Weather Channel, in multiple diving publications online and all over the Internet.

Milisen’s diving career started in the shark tanks at Mohegan Sun. He credits his father, Bill, a doctor of veterinary medicine with a PhD in pathology, as his inspiration for aquatic life and diving. His parents met at the University of Hawaii where both studied marine biology. His father worked as a diving scientist and the couple spent four years sailing around the south Pacific. The family came to Connecticut and Bill worked for Pfizer. Kathy Milisen died of breast cancer in 1995 when Jeffrey was 14 years old.

The young diver had expected to finish his biology degree at UConn, after completing his associate’s degree at Three Rivers Community College. But perplexed that he didn’t get in, even with almost a 4.0 GPA, he was glad that he’d applied to the University of Hawaii, too.

“I was ready to see the world,” says Milisen, who worked a variety of water-related jobs while completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology. That spanned from working at the Waikiki Aquarium, to marine debris collections and diving on the Kampachi Farms experimental aquaculture venture in the open ocean.

“We tethered aquaculture cages to the back of a sail boat and would go out 10 to 70 miles off the leeward side of the Big Island. That put us over some pretty intense conditions and deep water, 8,000 to 10,000 feet deep,” he says.

That experience, diving on a cage out in the open seas, twice daily for extended periods, awakened Milisen’s interest in the open ocean.

“Oceanic white-tipped sharks are a lot of fun. They are much more curious than the reef sharks; they’re zippy,” he says. “They are very much in your face, with their nose in the camera. They’re not all that big; the biggest I saw were seven or eight feet long.”

Milisen likens the open ocean to a desert; most of the activity and food is close to the shore, so fish swimming out in the open are usually looking for dinner.

“You’re always on the edge a bit out in the open sea. It’s the time to drop your work and watch the shark,” he says. “A humpback whale stopped by one day. If you’ve never had the chance to play with one of those, they are just gorgeous animals, incredibly intelligent and cautious, about 40 feet long. The way they look at you, it’s not like any other animal. It’s like a curious knowing gaze. They are wise, gentle animals.”

Although Bill had hung up his diving fins before Jeffrey and a brother Michael came along, father and son have done some diving together.

“He dove with me for the first time on a visit for my undergraduate graduation in 2009 along a reef at Puako, Big Island Hawaii,” Milisen says. In 2015, father and son paddled around Anna Maria Island in Florida; Milisen blogged about it and his Key West shark dive on his website.