Mike deGruy, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and marine biologist who through the lens of his submersible cameras transported viewers to the deepest crags of the oceans and face to face with swirling, pulsing sea creatures, died on Saturday in a helicopter crash in Australia. He was 60.

National Geographic, for which Mr. deGruy made many television documentaries, said in a statement that he and Andrew Wight, a pilot and also a filmmaker, were killed when their Robinson R44 helicopter went down shortly after takeoff from an airstrip in Jasper’s Brush, 80 miles south of Sydney.

In more than two-dozen documentaries over three decades, Mr. deGruy (pronounced de-GREE) filmed killer whales snatching sea lion pups off the beaches of Patagonia; lobsters migrating in the Bahamas; tiger sharks feeding on albatross in Hawaii; hydrothermal vents deep in the Atlantic and the Pacific; and the diversity of cephalopods like squid, cuttlefish and octopi.

In 2002 his cinematography on “The Blue Planet: Seas of Life,” an overview of the world’s oceans and their inhabitants shown on the Discovery Channel and the BBC, won both an Emmy and an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.