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SunDancer Imagery, Gloucester, MA (2026)

09/03/2026

Barrelling up from the depths. I have far to many pots on the stove, with writings, readings, culling, editing, contemplating future projects and being out on the water as much as possible. I actually had a few trips where there was nothing particularly photographic going on and it was a welcome lull in the memory card download process. Now that's not to say there still wasn't amazing things I was witnessing. On those days I go into a different observational mode, breaking down the who, what, when, where and why of what I'm seeing. What associations are taking place? How much bait is showing on the depth finder? What are they feeding on? What techniques are they using? Are they blowing bubble nets? Kick feeding? Do they have mud from the bottom on their rostrums from stirring up sand eels? What communication is taking place? Pec slapping? Tail lobbing? Trumpet blows? There is no shortage of fun fact finding intrigues for me. One such day I had a lot of whales in a huge area and all of them started communicating at the same time. A dozen whales miles apart all breaching, pec slapping and tail lobbing. We could see the splashes in the distance, half a mile that way, a mile over there, this incredible conglomeration of activity. Separate things all brought together into a single whole. What they were saying to each other and why are beyond our capabilities to understand, but being in the midst of it and contemplating these mysteries had my mind reeling. On that subject here is a poem written by the great writer Wendell Berry who passed away a couple days a go at the age of 92.
~
“So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.”
!!!

08/21/2026

Some people go on vacation for rest and relaxation, I on the other hand prefer to use that time for adventure. You could offer me an all expenses paid trip to a tropical paradise but if your response to my question of "ok but what is there to do?" is anything along the lines of sit on the beach and hang out, then I'm walking away before you finish the sentence. As Edith Wharton said, "Beware of monotony, it is the mother of all deadly sins." So last week I drove over a thousand miles, jumped in a mountain stream in the Berkshires, watched a hundred cedar waxwings hunt bugs over the water, viewed the sunrise break the horizon on the beach in Maine, was on four different boats, from Provincetown to Gloucester to New Hampshire, enjoyed one of those trips with my nephews, met new people, connected with friends, shared my love of the ocean, saw amazing things out on the water, got great photos, and on each trip I was on I got to spend time with dolphins! Like this one blazing out of a wave! By Friday evening I was spent, exhaustively satisfied and wanting for nothing. Except perhaps a full nights sleep and an actual meal.
Once I had those my next thought was how soon can I get back to the ocean?!
So far this year I have been with 86 different whales and 17 of them have been mom/calf pairs. Those are just the ones that could be positively identified. Not to mention all the basking sharks, mola molas, lion's mane jellies, a sea turtle, fin whales, minke whales and I'm sure I'm forgetting some things. Point being if you are at all considering a trip to the ocean, I would strongly suggest you go for the adventure and !!!

08/12/2026

Every once in a while you have one of those days that is truly spectacular. I just happen to have two of them in a row. Flying whales, dolphins, playful calfs, all sorts of behaviors and associations. I have a project ahead of me processing all the photos, so here is a teaser before I head back out on the water tomorrow. Stay tuned and !!!

08/07/2026

We're calling this one "Re-Entry". !!!

07/31/2026

I hope this photo conveys speed, because photographing dolphins is a lesson in photographic humility. In a sprint an Atlantic white sided dolphin can reach up to 28 mph. But it's not their velocity per say, I've photographed race cars and fighter planes, those are fast but there's a pattern. The only pattern with dolphins is there is no pattern, it is a free for all 3D world with no rules. Go fast, jump high, slice through the water, roll over, spin on a dime, twist, turn, jump higher and repeat. Then there's me, glitching out like a video game on the fritz. Trying to track, follow, anticipate, where, when, ooh those ones are jumping, there's more right below me! All while not forgetting to actually watch with my own eyes and be present while in the presence of nature's embodiment of pure joy. The Dolphin. !!!

07/29/2026

Every once in a while the ocean resists the urge to showcase it's unrelenting powers in even the most infinitesimal manner. No swell, no waves, no ripples, not a stitch of even the slightest breeze. Just flat as far as the eye can see. Throw in a cloudless deep blue sky and you get these incredible rich, smooth colors. Add in a whale named Dross subtly breaking the surface..(Dee-RAAAWSSSS to her friends) and you get this shot. She seems to show up in a lot of my favorite photos I have taken, always knows how to work the light just right. This shot is a bit abstract to those that may not be in the know. So, she's facing away that's her head up top, followed by the blowhole exhaling, those two white patches are her twelve foot long pectoral flippers, towards the rear is her dorsal fin just coming up, and sixty thousand pounds of whale gracefully gliding to the realm above. I am not sure I could accurately describe the refined tranquility of this scene. Flat water, no wind, rich colors, an almost defiant calmness.... and Dross bending the water around her with the lightest touch. !!!

07/28/2026

Atlantic White-Sided Dolphin! As we were waiting for a humpback to re-surface I was scanning the horizon through my lens when I got to shout my favorite phrase.. "I GOT LAGS!!!" It was a pod of 200-300! You may ask, how do I know how many? So here's your dolphin counting fun fact. As a general rule of thumb, and it's more of an estimation, but for every dolphin you see on the surface, multiply by a factor of three. One hundred on the surface, three hundred in the pod. The now former scientific name for these dolphins is Lagenorhynchus acutus, hence the "lags". It translates to sharp (acutus), bottle (lagenos), beaked (rhynchos). Science went and changed the name to Leucopleurus acutus recently, which means sharp white sided. Something about distinct evolutionary lines was the reason, ya ya ya I'm boycotting the change. I refuse to alter my favorite phrase. "I got Leucos", sounds like I need to be quarantined. Also, dark grey cape, white belly, light gray and yellowish/tan streaks running down the body but we'll name it for the small white patch on it's side. Brilliant. So their Lags, and they are staying Lags. As much as I love my time with our baleen whales, these wave surfing, bow riding, high flying, toothed whales get me down right giddy. This, is the only way to see dolphins. In. The. Wild. Please for the love of Sedna, goddess of the sea, don't go get in a pool with dolphins in those places. Full stop. Behind the curtain is horrifying, and how they end up there will turn your stomach. Instead... !!!

07/22/2026

If you manage to read this whole thing, let me know in the comments!

Did you know whales are right or left handed just like us? See the white area on the rostrum (the upper jaw) that is from scraping along the sea floor stirring up sand eels, a favorite meal of our humpback friends. Sand lance, or sand eels as their name suggests, like to bury themselves in the soft substrate, especially around this point in the summer when they go into what is called an estivation period. It's kind of like hibernation extra light for the hotter months, maybe there's not so many blooms of plankton to feed on so I'm just going to stick my head in the sand for a while. But...undisturbed rest and relaxation is another matter all together. Enter the humpback whale. This is where it gets really cool!

So a research paper just came out it's titled, "Meet me in the middle: potential collaborative benthic hunting in humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae)." I know, you've all left the chat to go download, read, highlight, look up terminology, scour the supporting evidence and make a summation. Not to worry, I've done that for you! First let's break down the title, Megaptera Novaeangliae is the scientific name of the humpback whale, and this is not a joke or even one of my amusing quips..it literally translates to "Big Winged New Englander". Benthic is just a sciency word for the ocean floor.
Collaborative, because our sentient, cognitive whale friends are working together to hunt...any guesses?? Sand Eels!

The how of it..using suction cups, a tag with all sorts of sensors and a really expensive camera gets dropped on the back of a whale. Retrieve the tag that was on a timed release, sit back and watch the show. There's tons of data and variations from all this so I'm going to give you a core part, and the whale that was tagged for this part? BOLIDE! That's the mom of "my whale", ya know the image that won the Grand Prize in that photo contest a couple weeks ago?! Shameless self promotion there. So here's the gist of it.

Bolide and two friends all dive down to the sea floor together. Now picture a clock, Bolide takes up the 12:00 position, the other two whales face her, one just off to the right at the 1:00 position, the other just off her left in the 11:00 position. So it looks like a big Y. They move towards each other, disturbing the sea bed, herding the now fleeing sand eels as they all open their mouths to engulf a meal. One minute you're on summer vacation, your eel tootsies in the sand, then boom you're in the story of Jonah. This is just one of the variations that were repeated but it gives you an idea of collaborative hunting.

One of things that makes this so extraordinary is that this collaboration mostly takes place in the animal kingdom where there is a family or social unit that is constant, think pods of Orcas or packs of African Painted Dogs. Humpbacks have a come and go approach of associations, they don't live in pods. Yet this is coordination, synchronization in behaviors, and cooperation with specialized repeated roles. As the paper put it, shows "team like" behavior. A key component to scientifically defining collaboration. All of it pointing to an extremely high level of complex cognitive ability.

Here's what the science won't, and the scientists can't tell you. These animals are for more intelligent and self aware than they get credit for. Just because it isn't obvious like a family of Orcas, or easily observable like a pack of Painted dogs, or doesn't fit into what we think we know about the evolutionary process, does not mean it isn't just as viable. The synchronization, altruism and sentientism of whales goes far beyond what data points can tell you. When the mindset of dismissing any and all anthropomorphic traits when observing the animal kingdom is dispensed with, we will begin to have a more collaborative view of the natural world.

07/20/2026

This scene is music to my ears. That is a cheesy way to introduce you to a whale named Music. A female that was first seen in 2007 , so we don't know how old she is. The only way to determine the age of a whale is if they are catalogued as a calf with their mom and subsequently tracked throughout it's life. We don't even have definitive science as to exactly how long whales live. In the grand scheme of nature we just haven't been studying them long enough. Speaking of grand and studying, the Grand Dame of the Gulf of Maine, a whale named Salt, the original to be named, was first seen in the mid 1970's and she was full grown then. Making her at least somewhere between 55 and 60 years old. But we don't really know. Same goes for Music, she's at least 20ish and has brought 3 calves to the feeding grounds in that time. As to her name, if you zoom in on the left part of her fluke you will see some white scrape marks, there's a matching set on the underside. Those are called rake marks, and are made from the teeth of an Orca when she was young. The pattern on the underside looks like a stave, that's the lines on a blank sheet of paper with the clef followed by key, pitch, notes etc. that composers would write symphonies on. Think Beethoven's fifth or the like. Hence the name Music. Each of our whales has a story to tell but we only know the smallest portion of their tales. So we observe, study, make notes, and attempt to garner whatever information we can, because without question, beyond a shadow of a doubt these are individuals. That fact is unassailable. Their behaviors, patterns, cognitions, are uniquely their own. What we don't know, is what could be revealed tomorrow, what chapter in the book could become unlocked and that is why every venture out in the big blue holds just as much anticipation as each one before it. It is never the same twice. So go to the ocean, !!! I will put a photo of the underside of Music's fluke in the comments so you can see where she got her name!

SunDancer Imagery

09/03/2026

08/21/2026

08/12/2026

08/07/2026

07/31/2026

07/29/2026

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