camera shy

i took a lot of pictures while i was on a boat for ten days. if you had to scroll down through every photo i took of water while attempting to get a dolphin photo, you’d be here for a few hours. i’m only giving you a few of the water shots, so you have an idea. basically, for every photo below with a dolphin in it, there are 10 photos in a folder somewhere of nothing-but-water. these few are actually the more interesting water shots, where you can tell there had been a dolphin there seconds before. a footprint.

a wake.

a breath.

a splash.

then there are such developed world problems as: the dolphins are too close to my camera for me to be able to focus on them.

we had a group of Lagenorhynchus obliquidens, commonly known as the pacific white-sided dolphin, play around our boat and check out our bongo plankton nets while we were towing them. just above, you can see the reflection of the tow cable across the blurry lag streaking by just below the surface.

i did catch a few shots worth sharing…

(keepin’ it real for our live studio audience: this would be long line fishing gear with dolphins playing gleefully around it.)

after a couple thousand frames of very well focused water droplets, or very out of focus partial fins, there is sometimes at the end of the day a single photo that made it worth standing there for hours, rocking back and forth, letting your arms and shoulder blades get sore holding up a 400x lens.

at least, if you’re me.