Stephen Frink//
Who were some of your other
influences?
FN//
Bates Littlehales was the first National Geographic
photographer I met. At the time, he was NGM’s
“underwater guy” and the one I emulated when trying to
build a team of support personnel for whale projects. For
make no mistake, whale photography does not happen
casually. A great deal of preparation and infrastructure
happens well in advance of the first shutter click. I
learned these things from Bates.
Once immersed in the world of National Geographic,
I recognized I had to find a different hook than their
most established underwater talent, David Doubilet. I
have always been in awe of David’s limitless creativity
but recognized my success with the magazine would
come from doing something unique. David and I always
kidded each other we had a “union” deal: He wouldn’t
shoot whales, and I wouldn’t shoot fish of color.
For my first 10 years, if I could get close to a whale,
have it in focus and in the middle of the frame, it was a
good whale picture. I became more discriminating, as
did my editors, with experience and time.
SF//
Whales are animals that give up their image
grudgingly. You must have had to invest a massive
amount of time to deliver the variety and depth you
show in Among Giants.
FN//
I averaged eight months a year in the field for
27 years, typically working with the very best cetacean
researchers in their respective fields. Another of my
influences and mentors, photographer Koji Nakamura,
taught me a philosophy that would guide me in wildlife
photography underwater and above. His approach was
“if you follow one animal long enough, it will do all the
things that animal does.” Logical, but also an epiphany,
for it suggested I had to invest significant time in my
pursuit of whale photography. It was greatly synergistic
that I was intending to do so for National Geographic,
as no other magazine encouraged photographers to
spend as much time on location, getting the story
exactly right.
I’d had some insights into whale photography as the
production stills photographer on Nomads of the Deep,
a 1979 IMAX film shoot in Maui. My father was the
cameraman, but my job was to get the shot and without
ever getting in the way of the big camera.
It was on the Nomads job I found the keys to whale
photography:
•
Work with people who know whale behavior and
have a unique perspective to illustrate. Jim Darling,
Peter Tyack, John Ford, Greg Silber and eight or nine
others were young whale researchers at the time
who led me to an endless line of new whale research
stories. These young grad students were changing
how we look at whales and moving us into the
benign study of whales and dolphins in the wild.
•
Invest the time. I tried to get sponsorship for triple
the time on location I thought might be necessary if
things went perfectly, because nothing ever goes as
you might expect in cetacean photography.
•
Be ready constantly. Chances are few and far
between. Having your equipment always ready was
another lesson drummed into me by my father.
Getting in the water quickly made all the difference
in these often very short encounters.
There is another reason it takes so much time to do
this work; great opportunities are very rare. In my 2009
National Geographic blue whale story, “Still Blue,” we
spent 30 days at sea, hundreds of miles from shore, and
all the underwater images came in a one-minute free
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