If you look at my photos, we’re making eye contact, we’re friends, we’ve played together
Even my suit – I tried all sorts of things and I ended up having it custom made. I prefer very thin suits with incredibly slick surfaces that allow me to go really fast.
Which camera do you work with now – what do you pack?
Today, my go-to would be the Nikon D850 and appropriate lenses. When the D850 came out, the reviews were so good, and I was already familiar with using the D800, so I went to a place to try it out. It just felt so good and I was able to take some test shots and look at the files – they looked great, so I took the plunge and got that camera.
It’s a beautiful camera, the files are ridiculously incredible and I can say it is the first camera that I’ve owned, since digital at least, that has made me look like a better photographer than I am. There are many cases where I’ve come out and I look at the photo and I go, ‘what! I took that?’ I’ll take all the help that I can get.
Let’s talk about whale poo! What’s it like to be pooed on and how did you recover from such a traumatic experience? (Laughs) Some years ago, as I spent more time with whales and getting better at being accepted by them, I realized that I got pooed on… a lot! At first, it was annoying and then I asked the question why are they doing this? I was looking specifically at sperm whales and it occurred to me that quite often when they poo you can’t see them.
You can’t see them?
Well, of course, because the poo is so thick and so big! It’s like a huge smokescreen – you can’t see anything. I started thinking, ‘what else does this? Squid’s ink! Like the squid, could the whales be doing this in self-defence? No, that’s silly.’ I kept this to myself for a while, then I read this passage from a book called
The Great Sperm Whale, by Richard Ellis. He referred to a case of how a close relative, dwarf sperm whales, would shit to cover themselves up when they were caught in a net. I emailed Richard, because he had bought some photos of mine to illustrate his book, and I sent him the photographs I took of the sperm whale poop cloud.
What did he say
He wrote back to say a self-defence mechanism is possible. Apparently, among the science community, I am the number one source for whale poop images in the world, so we exchange information quite a lot. It turns out that whale poop is very valuable for the circulation of nutrients around the entire globe, which then feeds into creating a lot of phytoplankton, which captures carbon, which then sinks to the bottom of the ocean. So, instead of trying to think about fancy machines to capture the carbon, we should just let the whales be and let them poop.
You use this knowledge along with your photographs in your talks to school children?
Yes, I try to speak to kids as much as possible, because that’s where change can be made for the long term. The challenge, of course, with kids is to keep them interested and I always try to get down to their level. Everyone sits on the floor and I’m in the middle, we’re eye to eye, we’re chatting, they’re asking questions and pointing to my ipad. Then, with a straight face you start talking about whale poop and you show them pictures of whales pooping and, my god, you’re friends for life!