One Whale of a Morning

One Whale of a Morning!

Just back from leading my annual Aquatic Mammals photo tour...so sorry that there's no bear in this shot!

What's that old saying? "Good things come to those who wait"? Well...this image came after a lot of waiting and, in this case, after a few hours of sitting in pea-soup fog while we could hear humpbacks surfacing and blowing but could see absolutely nothing. Fortunately for us the fog did eventually did lift and gave us a few moments of magical, early-morning lighting. Even more fortunately we had a very cooperative humpback whale who chose to surface, blow, and then roll down back under the water in exact position I would have placed it in my "perfect world".

I've said it many times before, but one of the toughest things in wildlife photography is avoiding becoming so completely enthralled by your subject that you can't see the "full scene" (or, I guess, the "big picture"!). In this shot it would have been easy to see "just" the whale and the backlit steam drifting upwards after it blew and not notice the beautiful layered ridges in the background (that so conveniently went from dark tones in the closest treed "ridge" throughout to very light pastels in the more distant background). I find this "not seeing the full forest for the dramatic tree (your subject)" is always something to be on the lookout for, but even more so if you happen to be hand-holding your camera and lens - it seems that when doing so it is so easy to let your eye "rest" on the subject (especially if it's moving) and not study the rest of the frame. One has to actively think "study the entire frame" while looking through the viewfinder in order to avoid the tendency to look only at the subject.

The toughest aspect of capturing this image in the field was positioning the whale this low in the frame and ensuring it was sharply in focus (this is almost full-frame, and the subject WAS this low in the viewfinder - and outside the zone the AF brackets can move to). To ensure maximum sharpness on the subject and still frame the scene the way I wanted I had to use the lowest focus brackets in my viewfinder, focus on the subject, lock the focus, and then quickly recompose the scene to include the distant ridges AND a sliver of sky in the frame. Why use the lowest AF brackets in the frame (rather than having the bracket at the centrepoint)? In using the lowest brackets I minimized the amount of recomposing needed to frame the image as seen above. In this case minimizing the recomposing time was critical to catch the moving whale exactly at the point in its dive that I wanted to. Little thing? Yep. But an important little thing!

Subject: Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeagnliae) surfacing just after sunrise
Location: Northern tip of Vancouver Island, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D800e
Lens: Nikkor 400mm f2.8 VR VR lens - handheld from sailboat. VR on and in "Normal" mode.
Exposure: 1/800s @ f11; ISO 250. -0.33 stop compensation from "recommended" matrix-metered exposure setting.
Crop: Extremely minor - this is at least 95% of full frame

More about this image (including processing details) can be found here...

http://www.naturalart.ca/galleries/latest/

Comments and critiques welcomed - probably best to view the larger version prior to doing so!

Cheers...

Brad