Fifty years since the release of Jaws, these photographers are showing a different, less frightening view of great white sharks.

Mike Coots, a keen surfer in the waters of his native Hawaii, was 18 when he was bitten by a tiger shark.

"It came from right underneath me and latched on", the photographer, now 44, recalls. "I felt this huge pressure but no pain. It was like an out of body experience."

The shark shook him back and forth "like a rag-doll", Coots says, until he managed to punch it three times on the nose, cutting his hand against its teeth as he did so. "It wasn't until I was paddling back into shore that I realised my leg had been completely severed and that there were big spurts of blood [coming from the stump] with each heartbeat."

Remarkably, Coots was back in the water with a new prosthetic leg just a month later. More remarkably perhaps, he has now become an advocate for shark conservation, using his pictures to help show a more naturalistic image of sharks than is often found in media and films.

"I'd taken this one shot off New Zealand in 2009 [of a shark exhibiting a behaviour called spy hopping, where it pokes its head up out of the water] and it became something of a meme," says Coots. "I started to see it all over, and the comments weren't, 'That's the scariest thing I've ever seen', but about how amusing it was, how it expressed curiosity, even personality. It was an 'a-ha!' moment for me – that the right images could shift us away from the usual demonisation of sharks."

Coots is among a wave of campaigning underwater photographers, including Kimberly Jeffries, George Probst, Caterina Gennaro and Renee Capozzola, who are attempting to overhaul our poor and often fearful view of sharks to help advocate for their conservation. Their images are typically up close and aim to capture natural shark behaviours –

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