Featured in the Coloradan

By William Drumm, underwater photographer and ocean ambassador

A Profile From My Alma Mater

I’m honored to be featured in the Coloradan, the magazine of the CU Boulder Alumni Association. Sara Muderick’s profile, William Drumm Follows Opportunity, traces how a kid who loved the ocean ended up building a career underwater.

Where It Started

I studied ecology and evolutionary biology and journalism at CU Boulder, class of 2008.

The story goes back further than that, to growing up in Australia and spending time on the beaches around Melbourne. As I told Sara, “I fell in love with the ocean at an early age.”

Photography came later. At CU I took Kevin Moloney’s introductory photojournalism course, and the university let students check out professional camera equipment.

Tadpoles, Dive Brands and a Hollywood Pool

One project from those years stuck with me: photographing tadpoles in British Columbia. Freshwater ecosystems and wetlands are under threat, which is why I wrote about why wetlands matter. Those images live in my tadpole photo guide.

My early success came in video, working with scuba diving brands, first as a videographer and later as a photographer. I saw a gap in how those brands used their content, and that pulled me into marketing too.

As I put it in the interview, “It’s hard to make a living as a photographer, so I followed the opportunities.”

The profile also covers the Billie Eilish Hit Me Hard and Soft album cover from 2024. Her team found my images of people swimming with humpback whales.

Instead of the open ocean, they rented a Hollywood film studio with a pool. It was a pinnacle moment for me.

And it includes the shot that got away: a roughly 20-day trip to the Azores where I saw the animals I hoped for, but poor underwater conditions left me with almost no usable images. That is part of this work too.

Thank You, CU

Thank you to Sara Muderick, the Coloradan team, and the CU Boulder Alumni Association for telling this story. If you found me through the magazine, welcome. You can see more of my work in my portfolio and my fine art prints. Go Buffs.