Whale watching

The wife and I are heading out for central Oregon. We will be on a whale watching charter tomorrow. Depoe bay has a pod of gray whales that resident there in the spring and summer. Hopefully some good pics. to post after the weekend.

Any tips for hand held shots on a boat? Any tips are greatly appreciated.

John P said:

The wife and I are heading out for central Oregon. We will be on a whale watching charter tomorrow. Depoe bay has a pod of gray whales that resident there in the spring and summer. Hopefully some good pics. to post after the weekend.

Any tips for hand held shots on a boat? Any tips are greatly appreciated.

Click to expand...

Fast shutter speed.

What lens are you going to use?
If you using one with VR, it may have an active on-off switch as well.
Since you going to be in a boat, make sure active mode is 'on'
​

I recommend a good strap or lanyard to help make sure you don't drop your nikon.

We will be taking my D7100,D90
And her D40.
All with different lenses(no lens changes)
Fast shutter speed will be a must.

Guess it depends on the weather? Dont know if a ND-filter could help (if the sun is really bright)?

Overcast skies this weekend.
Should be perfect.

A long lens, since the boats are not allowed to approach very close. Probably should turn VR Off for any fast shutter. ND allows wide aperture, but counter productive for fast shutter (which needs lots of light).



Bubble netting near Juneau. f/6.3, 1/1000 second, ISO 320. 200 mm lens in DX camera (300mm effective). Only modest crop.

Thanks for the tip. I will turn off the VR.

We will be running a 24-120, 70-300,
And a 12-24

My bet is on the 70-300mm. A single whale in the previous picture would need relatively much cropping.




This one is 200mm f/2.8 with 1.7x teleconverter, for 340mm (510mm effective on DX).

f/7.1, 1/1250 second, ISO 400, cropped to about 2/3 frame width.
(teleconverter needs at least f/7.1)

Got 3 decent tail shots.

John P said:

Got 3 decent tail shots.

Click to expand...

​We want to see

I will put some up tonight after work.

Couldn't have had a better weekend. The weather was great.
We booked our whale watching trip with Tradewinds charters in Depoe Bay. They were really nice and put us on whales quickly. I would HIGHLY recommend them.

Gray whales are not acrobatic. So I was worried that we would only get shots of them rolling to breath. They just look like big gray rocks doing that. But luckily this whale did a deep dive while we were there. So we got some decent tail shots.

Tradewinds also charters fishing trips.

Does anyone know of any whale charters in northern Oregon?