Friday, August 8, 2014

North Atlantic Right Whale story

Grand Manan, Canada August 7, 2014 I had the opportunity to travel to Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy across from New Brunswick, Canada for this story, which focuses on a famous marine biologist and his quest for saving the North Atlantic Right Whales. He told us, he had not been to the Bay of Fundy area for several years and the last time he'd been there they'd only seen few Right whales. However at the end of our 14-hour day out there, he told us how lucky we’d been with the weather and with the large numbers of whales we got to see. He and his wife told us, we might've seen about 60 cetaceans and out of that many creatures about 50 of them were Right whales. I have a ton of images of whale tails (flukes) coming out of the water. However, what called my attention was the scarring due to propellers one of these creatures had. I also couldn't help but notice how much like nostrils those blowholes truly look. And of course I was fascinated withe the "barnacle beards" they sport. The flukes, and the barnacle patterns is what helps scientist differentiate one from another. TECH STUFF: two Nikon bodies: D3s, D4/ Three Nikon lenses: 500mm AF 4.0, 70-200mm 2.8 with a 1.4TC and a 17-35mm 2.8/ ISO 100-640/ WB: sunny and cloudy/ Format: JPG Fine (PS: the whale images are pretty much full frame) Behind the scenes: I love my 500 F4 because of all the prime telephotos Nikon has, this is one of the lightest so I can hand hold it. However 14 hours of hoisting that bad boy to my eye took me out of commission. My forearms became very sore, as well as my shoulders and my spine. Being in a boat did not help much. But I wouldn't trade the kind of shooting day I had yesterday for anything in the world.