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Swimming with Whales
By Stuart Conway
Humpback whales are impressive, gigantically impressive. For years I've longed to photograph them and explore their world. And for months I planned my trip waiting patiently while they made their long migration from Antarctica to Vava'u, a string of tiny islands in the Kingdom of Tonga, in the South Pacific seas, where they gather in large numbers to mate and give birth.
As I sat on the edge of the boat my excitement turned to caution as directly ahead are what looked like two giant 45ft submarines floating on the surface.
I was thinking about a researcher in Alaska who reported seeing a Humpback come underneath his boat and the next minute he was in total darkness, encased in the whale's huge mouth. His Zodiac boat was still floating on water that had been swallowed inside. Thankfully the whale was as shocked as the researcher and opened his mouth and released him in a few seconds.
Our guide Rae insisted that I didn't take the camera on our first encounter with the whales, she said it was important to experience the whales first.
It was the hardest thing leaving the camera behind and not knowing what shots I was going to miss, but I was so glad I did it.
With my head down in the water, all I could see was the blue abyss. I presumed they had gone away. Then I looked up, and there she was. A giant 45ft humpback whale, floating on the surface just 20 feet away.
She gazed right at me with her black eye the size of an orange. She was still, unhurriable, watching.
But the stillness was broken by a large splash, as her baby, the size of an elephant, came zooming up from underneath her and charged straight towards us.
As he came towards us, twirling, his fin just missed me. But determined to show me, how clever he was, he rolled onto his back and come up close again.
This time his mother decided it was time to intervene. Now, it's one thing when a calf comes within inches, but quite another when his submarine sized mother does it.
With her long nose she gently nudged him away from us, then curled her pectoral fins, that were double the length of my body, under her huge mass so they wouldn't bump us as she gracefully glided by just a few feet away.
I didn't feel my heart beat once the entire time, but as soon as she had gone it started pounding from the thrill and shock of being so close.
Photographing whales is such an intense experience, I needed to simply experience them the first time or I may have been so captivated by them I would have either just focused entirely on the pictures and not experienced them properly or not been able to focus on photographing them at all.
I think experiencing them without photographing them the first time, although it went against all my instincts, helped me to focus my intention when I experienced them again and get better shots.
I understood more how they moved and the challenge of getting a shot of a creature so large and so close underwater.
I couldn't imagine using film in this situation. I'd have gone through a role in a minute and every encounter was so precious as you never knew how long you'd have. Having a large card and knowing that I had plenty of shots allowed me to pace myself and enjoy the experience. I shot over five thousand pictures in a about twelve days and copied them onto my portable 80 G firelite drive everynight.
Respecting the whales was a really important part of getting good shots. If you jumped in the water next to a mother and calf and alarmed them they'd take off.
Whales swim so fast and dive so deep the encounters are always on their terms and sometimes we had to keep our distance, especially with Mom's and their new calves so they learnt to trust us.
It's hard to resist the opportunity to take every picture possible, but it really did pay off to get out of the water sometimes, or pull right back and allow them time to get used to me.
I used a Canon 20D and 16-35mm with a two Lexar Professional 4GB cards inside an underwater photography bag made by EWA marine.
I also shot everything RAW to get the best quality
Ideally I would have had a wider lens because the closer you are of course the clearer the visibility and often the best experiences happened a few feet in front of me, so I found myself finning backwards to try to capture the whole whale. I have since bought a 1dsMk2 and that would have been perfect for the job.( Although I would have been a bit more nervous taking it in the water! )
I hope I have the opportunity to visit the whale nursery again sometime in the not too distant future.
Stuart Conway's Bio
www.stuartconway.com
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