48.2

This past winter I was contacted by Pacific Life Insurance Company to submit images for their annual report. Guess what? One of my images was selected for the cover! This image is the only breaching humpback whale photo that I have from Hawaii and has never been one of my favorites, however, it just sold for a reasonable amount of money. The lesson here is that no matter how I might feel about a particular image, it can have more value than any of my favorite images. When I was in Alaska last month, I saw an amazing full body breach by an adult humpback whale, but of course I was still too far away to photograph it. After a lot of excited screaming of many expletives, I had a very interesting discussion with my crew. They asked me how many breaches I have seen? I guessed somewhere between 300 and 500 breaches in the last 10 years, but only 20-30 of them were photographable. That is a ratio of at best of 1 photographable breach for every 30 breaches I observe. It also means that I have spent a lot of time on the water around whales, which happen to be my favorite subject to photograph. I created this image with my Canon 5D and 70-200mm f2.8 IS lens. This image is a single-exposure which required a minimal amount of processing using Aperture 2 and Photoshop CS4.