Common Dolphin

[johnd]

This is a sequence of images of a Common Dolphin shot of the South East coast of Tasmania. We were cruising out of Port Arthur close to Tasman Island when we saw a school of hundreds of these dolphins. Common Dolphins are about 1.5 - 2 metres in lengthand are common to Tasmanian waters but the skipper said that it's quite rare to see them in such numbers. We went close to the school and they started following the boat, surfing it's wake. You see dolphins leaping in zoos and aquariums, but I think it's fairly rare for most of us to see them behaving like this in the wild.





See them bigger here


Cheers
John

[chrisk]

great images. i havent seen dolphin shots this clear and animated for a long time.

[dm_td5]

Great shots John. I love watching dolphins and we get quiet a lot of them up here. They'll play around the bows of boats and are fantastic to watch. The ones we get are a smaller breed than the southern waters. We also get pilot whales and have even had a pod of Killer Whales come in to the bays - I thought they were only a cold climate whale.

I'm afraid if it had been me I probably would have forgotten to take pictures.

[Pehpsi]

Such a great sequence of shots

[ozimax]

Wow, these are great. Are they heavily cropped? Nice work.

Ozi.

[gstark]

John,

Are we looking at out of camera jpgs again? The detail in these is simply amazing: the texture of the water along the skin, as they're jumping through the water ... breathtaking!

[Oscar]

Love these shots John. Haven't seen the regular pod of dolphins at my favourite spot for some time now

These are great captures. Well done. Mick

[johnd]

Thanks for the comments everyone. These were my favourite shots from the weekend (although I haven't had a good look at the sea cliff shots yet). The skipper said there were some killer whales a couple weeks back but he'd never seen so many dolphins before. There were litterally hundreds in some sort of feeding frenzy when we arreived. The water was boiling with them feeding but they seemed to stop feeding and started playing with the boat. In the higher res shots on my PC you can see this dolphin has some propeller gashes on him, so he's tried this before and come off second best.

These are out of the camera jpegs with some minor PP. Taken with D3, 80-400 VR lens (at 185mm, they were close), 1/1000 sec, f5.6, ISO560 (love this high ISO capability) shooting at 9fps with continuous focus in manual mode. They are about 2000px horizontally cropped down from 3850px or whatever the D3 does, so no, not hugely cropped. The PP was auto contrast, shadow/highlight to add a bit of mid tone contrast and pull out a bit of highlight, then a minor USM.

Cheers
John

[ATJ]

Excellent shots. So sharp and vibrant. You must be well pleased.