Photo of the Week: April 13, 2009

Hi gang! I am pretty excited about this week’s POTW. It is an image of the face of a California gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) taken in San Ignacio Lagoon off the Pacific Coast of Mexico’s Baja peninsula. While I am definitely pleased with the image, I want to be careful not to give the wrong impression. I had to work at getting this shot, and I got a little bit lucky in terms of having a curious whale come to my panga when the water conditions worked in my favor. I also had the benefit of having worked with gray whales in the lagoon years ago, and I knew that water conditions are not exactly what we dream about. On the average the visibility is in the 4 to 10 foot range, and sometimes it is less. So no matter how close a whale gets to your skiff (panga) there are times you simply don’t have enough visibility to see from the tip of the whale’s head to its eye. I suppose it is obvious that underwater photography in such restricted visibility makes things pretty tough.

San Ignacio is one of a series of lagoons along the Pacific coast of Baja where California gray whales are known to go to mate and calve. Tourism in the lagoon is highly regulated- as it should be. San Ignacio is remote, isolated and truly a wonderful place to see gray whales and other marine and desert wildlife.

Frankly, filming gray whales in the lagoon is about the scariest thing I have ever done underwater. It’s easy to write about the fact that full grown gray whales reach a length of close to 50 feet long while weighing as much as 40 tons, and it is quite another matter to be in the water with such an enormous animal only to have it seem to completely disappear when the whale is only a few feet away. When the visibility is only 4 to 6 feet, and a whale is only 10 to 15 feet away, you don’t even see a change in water color or a shadow that lets you know where the whale is. You raise your head up at the surface and see the whale in front of you only a few feet away, but when you put your face into the water all you see is pea green water turning to black. Get bumped a time or two by an 80,000 pound animal, and it’s easy to lose your air of bravado.

In any case, on my recent trip with Baja Expeditions diving was not allowed- never is without a special permit from the Mexican Government, and even for scientists a permit is extremely difficult to come by. But it was possible to take photographs from the pangas at the surface and to hold a housing over the side to try to “steal” a lucky underwater shot. The photographic question for me was whether it was going to be a complete waste of time to try for an underwater shot when I might get some nice images shooting topside as there was plenty of whale action at the surface to see and photograph.My strategy was to get some good topside images first, and after that, if water conditions were favorable to try for an underwater opportunity. For any chance at a good underwater shot I needed a cooperative whale, relatively good visibility and not too much wind. With too much wind the skiff rocks so much that I was constantly creating barrages of bubbles that showed up in disastrous fashion in front of my dome port as my camera system and my arms bobbed in and out of the water. Favorable water conditions meant that we probably needed to be near the mouth of the lagoon during an incoming tide when relatively clear water pours into the lagoon, and I needed a curious whale to be in the mouth of the lagoon near our panga at that time. The combination of all these factors coming together is what I mean by saying I got lucky.

I set up my housing with a Tokina 10-17 mm zoom lens set close to the 10 mm (fisheye) end, and I selected the shutter-priority shooting mode. I used a shutter speed of 1/125^th of a second. In hindsight I could have used a shutter speed of 1/500^th to increase my chance to get a sharper image. I used matrix metering and an ISO of 320 with a Nikon D2X. I set the camera to under expose the image by one-half f/stop thinking that any whitewater splashes at or near the surface and any whitish skin around the whale’s mouth might get blown out with no exposure compensation. For this shot my metering system gave me an f/stop of f/13, but I would have been quite happy to have been shooting at f/5.6, meaning I could have used a faster shutter speed. But things were happening fast and I didn’t have time to check my exposures and histogram at the time so I just took my best guess and went for it.

I was constantly brushing air bubbles off my port to keep it clean, and with my camera set to shoot five frames a second I hoped for a pass with the whale having its face parallel to the side of the skiff. Lucky me, I got a few very nice passes, and while I was “shooting blind” (not being able to look through the viewfinder) and just holding the camera over the side and framing by guess and experience, I managed to get a couple of nice frames.

This week’s POTW is one of my better images, and I do hope you enjoy it!