Working the Angles

I've been wanting to post this photograph from my recent trip to Ogasawara for a while, but haven't been able to find time to do so because preparation for my upcoming trip to Ambon has been so crazy-hectic.

Anyway, this is a photo of an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus).


Top-down view of an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin

It's not a particularly rare or unusual animal, but I like the photo because of the angle. It's not often that you come across a top-down photo of a dolphin, probably because it's not all that often that you find yourself...well...on top of a dolphin!

Actually, I saw this animal surfacing slowly to take a breath, and I swam over specifically to get this shot...a slightly different take on an otherwise familiar animal.

Having a 10-17mm Tokina lens attached to a Canon 7D camera helped a lot. The fisheye perspective helped to accentuate the streamlined curvature of the sleek marine mammal's body, and the 7D's rapid shutter rate gave me several successive shots to frame the animal exactly right.