I set this site up on 27 June 2006.
That's like 1400 years ago in Internet time.
So much has happened.
I'm twenty years older, for a start. I've had incredible experiences, made lots of friends, and somehow managed to stay reasonably even-keeled(?) in the face of all manner of social, economic and political turmoil.
Count my blessings, I do.
I figured I should mark this date somehow, commemorate the fact that I've been writing and posting images on various iterations of this site for two decades.
I spent a big part of that time with humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus), so I looked through archives for images of these two species, which resulted in (way too) many hours flipping through photos and reminiscing.
In the end, I picked a few to re-process. I've shared most of the images before, but I thought it worth trying again with modern software (and more experience/ knowledge on my part).
First is a photo that I took almost exactly two months after starting this blog.
It was sunny, the ocean calm, whales chill.
Next is a male humpback whale calf playing in front of his mother:
There is no mistaking the joie de vivre.
This is a young male blowing bubbles:
This calf was attacked early on, most likely by marine mammals (judging by the scars). In spite of the trauma, he healed, became strong and confident, and was a wonderful friend during the couple of months we had together.
This is a closest I ever got to seeing mating:
The pair descended, making it impossible to see what might have taken place. Then again, maybe nothing happened. Who knows?
I recalled the following moment with great fondness, when the juvenile sperm whale flipped upside-down for a wee squiggly play:
Adult females in a given sperm whale social unit raise young in a communal manner, so it is not possible to know if the big whale here is the mommy or an auntie. Whatever the case, the little one was clearly happy.
This is another adult female, one that had just come up from foraging in the abyss. See the bit of squid stuck to her upper jaw?
There is a chance that the squid part is from an Architeuthis dux giant squid. That's a popular dish among the sperm whales that frequent this area.
How do I know?
A year prior, I met this female:
Swimming under and past my friends and me, this female turned out to be the matriarch of the social unit foraging in the area. She buzzed and scanned us several times, getting to know us in a manner of speaking.
When she brought up a mouthful of giant squid a few days later, she swam directly beneath us, giving us a perfect view.
"Now why," you might think, "would a sperm whale bring giant squid to the surface?" Seems awfully inefficient, doesn't it?
The reason is probably the calf on the left of the photo. It was pretty big. Big enough perhaps, to be learning about deep-dining. Our working theory is that she brought the squid up to educate the calf, part of the weaning process.
I'll wrap-up with a couple of images that I did not edit/ process at the time I took them for some reason (probably because I got sick of staring at a computer screen).
A classic humpback whale image of a mother with calf...tough to be beat in terms of tugging at heartstrings:
And finally, a social unit of sperm whales enjoying some quality time with one another:
Twenty years is a long time to be doing anything.
But I can't think of anything that I would have rather been doing for those twenty years.
FWIW: For photographers, I took these images with Canon1DsMkII, 5DMkII, 7D and 5DMkIII cameras—all museum technology at this point. Revisiting the photos with recent software was a pain, but the resulting files are better in every way than what I was able to output originally, especially the high-resolution versions in wider colour spaces.