Tag Archives: Albany

Albany Humpback Whales

During our recent travels in Western Australia there was a heap of great and varied photographic opportunities. (I hope to write a post about some more of them soon …) But one of the real highlights for us was during our time in Albany on the south coast of the state, where you look out into the Southern Ocean and there’s no land between the shore and Antarctica.

We took a boat out from the port in Princess Royal Harbour into King George Sound to look for whales, which are now in their seasonal migration from the northwest coast of Australia en route to Antarctic waters for the summer. The weather was a bit ‘iffy’, with some heavy rain, winds and some swell as we set out, but it cleared gradually during the course of our journey out across King George Sound past Michaelmas and Breaksea Islands.

And then we saw the whales. They were jumping (‘breaching’) on all sides of us, probably eight to ten of them. It was hard catch them on the camera, as you couldn’t tell where the next one was going to launch from. I was using the 70-200mm f2.8L lens at ISO 400, f4 and shooting fast (1/3200 second) to freeze them in the air, and counteract the occasional lurching of the boat in the swell. I  also braced myself standing between two stainless steel railings on the boat to keep my balance!

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John Woodbury owns the catamaran that we were on, and he takes people out pretty much every day to look for whales during the ‘season’. He reckoned that he’d never seen such a sustained spell of them jumping like that, and this was the first time that he’d had to turn back for port with them still putting on a show.

The next day I gave John copies of some of the photos, which he liked enough to pass them on to a bloke at the local paper, the Albany Advertiser. He in turn he contacted me to ask permission to reproduce them in the paper. I agreed to supply them without charge on condition that I got full attribution and the article included a link to my web site. Always get attribution! The newspaper article is up on their web site at this link.

You can see the full set of whale photos, also including some images of Fur Seals, on the Jokar website in this folder.