Pacific White Sided Dolphins

White sided dolphins I photographed while travelling on our cruise.

We are on a cruise through the Panama Canal.  Today, off the coast of Oregon, I saw a pair of dorsal fins that were poking out of the water.  "Dolphins!" I thought.

I grabbed my gear and headed to the Promenade deck where I could see the ocean without glass being in the way.  No sign of the dolphins.  I talked to a few people and asked them if they saw them.  Vague reports about seeing some playing off the bow in the waves emanating from the ship.  However, I did see them.

I made my way around the promenade a few times and then, to my joy, I saw the tell-tale sign of a dorsal fin in the water.  Then a jump, there it was, a dolphin.  As I brought my camera to bear, I noticed another, then another.

In fact, there were dozens of them, swimming and jumping in large arcs, heading right for the ship.  Sixty or seventy to be sure, maybe more.  I started shooting.

The challenge was seeing where a dolphin was, predicting where it would show up next, focusing on that spot, and hoping to see it.  I got lucky a few times, but by and large my greatest success was with the dolphins that swam parallel to the ship, about 70 yards away, and predicting where they would be wasn't difficult.

I got about 40 shots in all.  Then, as quickly as they came, they were gone.  Beyond the difficulty of predicting where they would be at any one time was the fact that it was foggy.  The images were flat grey with almost no contrast.  It took significant tweaking in Photoshop to extract details.  In the end, though, the effort was worth it.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

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