Being Prepared

Classic Whale Tail

One of the best whale tails I have seen recently was from the upper deck of a cruise ship bound for Ketchikan.  The whale surfaced and then dove just off the starboard side of the ship - water falling from the fluke and glistening in the sunshine.  And there I was with a wide angle lens trying to do landscape - rather than wildllife - photography!  I bring three lenses for my Canon dslr when I travel : a 24-105 (my landscape lens), a 70-200 (my wildlife lens) and a 50 f/1.4 (my available light lens).  I tend to carry all three with me to shore but on board the ship I will put one on my camera and leave the rest back in the room. 

So there I stood, on the open deck of the ship about as high above the water as I could possibly get when Jan - who can spot whales miles away from the ship - calls out "whale"!  I swung into action with the entirely wrong lens but fired off a few shots anyway.  What looked like a punctuation mark in the original image turned out to really be a whale tail when heavily cropped.  And that's one of the advantages of today's digital cameras - the resolution is so high that images usually stand up quite well to serious cropping.  Is this any kind of award winning image?  Not a chance, but it does show that even when you aren't prepared to take a proper picture, sometimes you can make do with what you have.

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