Playing with Humpback Whales
An underwater cameraman describes what his job is like.

I was recently in Tonga to shoot videos of humpback whales for the British Broadcasting Corporation (popularly known as the BBC). I’m very lucky to have such a great job that I get paid to visit places like Tonga and because of what I do I often get the chance to get much closer to amazing animals than normal divers.

LOOKING FOR A ‘BLOW’
Honestly, filming whales is very hard work. Just looking for them can be extremely difficult because they spend such a long time underwater and only pop up for a breath a few times every hour. So we would drive around in the boat looking for these ‘blows’. On this particular day though, the water was very calm and we saw a blow straight away. We headed straight over and found not one whale but two – a mother with her baby calf.

TRYING TO KEEP UP
Normally, whales are on the move all the time and if you’ve ever tried to keep up with a swimming whale you’ll know not to bother! However, calves don’t have enough strength to move as fast and have to come up to breathe more often than their mothers so that meant, as a cameraman, I could stay with the whales longer and shoot lots of film.