Shooting on a moving boat: whale watching off Dana Point
Published on 2011-02-02 01:19:36
It was a beautiful day in sunny California and the Laguna Sea Dwellers had their yearly whale watching cruise off the coast of Dana Point.
If you've never been on a whale watching cruise, that's quite an experience.
Last year I got very lucky and went on a dive boat off Puerto Vallarta (Mexico) that was also doubling as a floating open bar and a whale watching expedition. Since I was diving, I passed on the bar and missed the deadly Margaritas. I did also miss my DSLR when whales start jumping around us like crazy. All I had was my trusty but sooooo slow underwater point & shoot. I nonetheless managed to get one good shot out of the dozen times a happy male whale jumped out of the water and displaced 10,000,000 gallons of water next to our boat in the process just to impress a couple of nearby females. I remember doing that at the pool as a teenager and I never got the girl. I hope that whale got luckier.
So this time I took my new Canon T2i for the ride. I mounted my 70-300mm lens, turned on the stabilizer, found the best spot at the bow of the boat and patiently wait for the action to start.
Whale watching is basically a game of hide and seek. The playground is huge though and the whale have the advantage that they can just hide underwater (and they do!)
On the boat, no fancy sonar and no tracking airplane or helicopter. Just plain old eagle eyes sometimes augmented by marine goggles. There's probably half a dozen whale watching operations between Newport Beach and Dana Point and they all communicate with each other when they spot a whale. After almost one hour going North, already in the waters around Laguna Beach, we finally spotted three whales cruising South. Since another boat was already on the scene I assume they called us. The whales gave us a little show, nothing compared to the exuberance of the whales of Puerto Vallarta (those Mexican whales are hot hot hot!), but we still saw one breaching and showing its head! We had a couple of flukes as well as a few barrel-rolls which is always fun to see.
We stayed pretty far from the whales the whole times so the 300mm was very useful. Add to that the 18Mpix of the T2i and the possibilities to zoom in in the digital darkroom increase!
There is however two issues: 1. the boat moves and 2. the autofocus has sometimes hard times to lock on the target. To compensate for this, shooting in Manual with a large depth of field while still maintaining a fast enough shutter speed seems adequate. On that trip however, since we were facing the sun most of the time, getting a correctly exposed picture in Manual is quite hard. So I ended up shooting in P, increasing the shutter speed to compensate for the boat movements. As expected, the results were mixed. Some of the shots were sharp enough, others required heavy post-processing and a few were blur beyond reconstruction. One thing for sure, I won't blow a 24x32 poster with any of them!
So if you're into wildlife topside photography, try a whale watching trip, bring a decent camera and have fun!
React to this article
Be the first one to react!
Take me back home