Of Land & Sea

2025

Image Story

As always in photography, it's the tiniest details that make the biggest images.

In the wildlife world we call your first sighting of an animal a ‘lifer’. I have a number of animals I am desperate to see, for my ‘lifer’ moment. Orcas have been near if not top of this list for a decade.

My parents had the VHS of Free Willy when I was going up and it was an after school favourite of mine - that or Tarzan. So it’s hardly a surprise I ended up in this industry. Having ticked Tarzan’s mates off my bucket list a few years and a couple of grey hairs ago now, I had all my fingers crossed we might see orca in Alaska this year.

Our boat captain thought we might be a little early in the year for them, but they’d had their first sighting of the season the week before so it was by no means off the cards.

We had been out at sea for about three, perhaps four hours when Harry, a fellow photographer, spat out his lunch and shouted, “Orca” - and there, half way between us and shore, was a pod of orca.

Regulations in the bay meant no more than one boat at a time with the pod and thankfully, due to the early season, we were the only boat around, so we cruised along - often losing the orcas below the water only for them to reappear miles beyond where we had expected them to be.

The game became how to photograph an animal when you can only see 10% of it. I would get glimpses of a dorsal fin, sometimes just a small section of a head but that was it. So rather than focus on the animal I checked my surroundings. I found the landscape shot I wanted - and imagined how it could look if the male breached, and hoped. Naturally the first 10 or 15 shots I hoped for I missed - but as we were finishing our hour with this wonderful little pod I got two chances in quick succession and just about caught them both. Thank god the waters were calm and the clouds low, all of it works together and culminates in that little ‘woosh’ from the whales blow hole. As always in photography, it’s the small details that count the most.

Enquire Now

Standard: 35" x 23" Medium: 45" x 29" Large: 55" x 35" X-Large: 65" x 42"

Enquire Contact Will

Behind the Lens

This was all about trying to predict where the animal would breach, line that up with the backdrop we wanted and hoping it would all come together. There were stacks of misses before there was any kind of hit.