Chasing Double Breaches

I do have a love / hate relationship with double breaches! On one hand they are just about the most amazing thing you could possibly ever witness, on the other hand getting good photos of them is incredibly hard!

To start with the odds of ever seeing a double breach are incredibly rare. We are fortunate enough to see humpback whales on a daily basis for about 7 months of the year during our whale watching season and as they are quite known for throwing in the odd breach every once in a while, we get to see breaches almost every day.

Double breaches however are much rarer! We may get only a handful each season and getting a good photo of one seems to be down to sheer luck…

It is all about being in the right place at the right time and if you miraculously manage to be in the right place at the right time, taking a good photo is far from guaranteed.

Everything has to be perfect: The whales need to come out more or less at exactly the same time. I have missed double breaches because one whale came out of the water maybe half a second before the other one and i zoomed in on it so quickly that i never saw the second whale through the viewfinder..

… Jonas, did you get that double breach? There was a double breach?!?

Then the whales need to be close to each other. Quite often they would breach maybe 50 meters apart , so in order to get them both on the one photo i would have to zoom out a lot, reducing both of them to two small black dots on an image with a lot of sky and water.. I have intentionally given up on double breaches in the past knowing the photo would be worse than focusing in on just the one whale.

There are some great photos of double breaches out there, taken by people for whom all the stars have aligned.

Have i taken a great double breach photo? You be the judge…