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MALE SPEAK: So good afternoon, everyone.
Today we have another outstanding
Authors at Google Talk.
We're very honored to welcome Bryant Austin
to our midst today.
He is a conservationist, a photographer first and
foremost, and really a storyteller of the whales that
are throughout the world.
He has over the past decade or more embarked on a quest to
create large format photography
of the world's whales.
And his story is extremely fascinating, both from a
technical standpoint and for how he is able to change the
conversation of whale conservation away from just
the whales jumping out of the water, like the Pacific life
visual to something even more compelling more direct, which
is these face to face interactions with whales, and
the look in their eyes, so to speak.
So we'll invite him on stage, and we'll also have time for
some questions at the end.
So please join me in welcoming Bryant to Google.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
BRYANT AUSTIN: Thank you, Cliff.
This is my first time here.
It's pretty exciting, so thanks for having me.
Oh, is this--
so I thought what I would do is just give you a little
perspective on kind of what led to this.
I mentioned I make very big photographs of whales.
These are life size photographs, but also very
high resolution.
And it's not anything that happened overnight.
It's been an evolution, so I look forward to sharing that
with you today.
For the past 10 years with whales, I've wanted to create
something that would move and inspire someone who has no
interest in whales.
Someone who may eat whales.
And I wanted to see if that might be possible.
And so I started this probably in 1998, actually.
And I'd been an artist since I was five, a painter.
Switched to photography in my '20s, and swam with my first
whale in 1994.
And took pictures, and looked at them, and they just did not
convey what I experienced with the whale.
And in fact, none of the photographs I've seen of
whales underwater convey what one experiences when they're
so close to you.
So I gave up photography 20 years ago, photographing
whales and volunteering with many conservation
organizations.
And really became burned out from that experience.
And I was burned out from painting, and so I decided in
1998 to begin photographing marine mammals as an art form
with no real agenda.
I just wanted to see if I could create something
special, and really what was at the core of the work is
this idea of decoupling the pressure of making a living
from photography, from the craft itself.
So I started with sea otters, and by the time I was done
with sea otters, I started with whales.
A professor loaned me his Zodiac from UC Santa Cruz, and
I just started to get the courage and the interest to go
further offshore.
And this was 2003, so I had a boat, a team of volunteers.
That was a trailer I lived in for four years near the Long
Marine Lab.
Everything I earned went into this work.
Experimenting with all kinds of camera equipment.
This is a gyro stabilized steady cam that I built with
the first autofocused medium format camera made by
Hasselblad.
And I would wait for the most ideal weather conditions.
It only happened a couple times a month, when winds were
less than five knots and the sea states were calm.
We would go out and cover up to 80 miles a day
in search of whales.
And during the four years of doing this, this was, I think,
one of the only photographs I had.
It's just this idea of bringing together like, sea
states, atmospheric conditions and behavior.
Bringing it all together, and that was one of the few
photographs.
And I was really starting to doubt my pursuits.
I wasn't sure if this was something
that was a good idea.
And towards the end of this time, I had an encounter with
a blue whale.
And with whales, I didn't know how to photograph them
underwater in a way that would inspire
unexplored thought and emotion.
And above water I had some ideas, but I'd never motor up
to a whale.
I'd never swim after a whale or pursue them.
And now I wait for them to come to me.
But at the time, I didn't even know that.
I just thought, well, I'm here.
I really don't know what to do, other than position myself
where the light is best.
And whenever we'd see a blue well or a humpback, the boat
would drop down to two miles an hour, steady course, no
changes, and observe.
And they're foraging 300 feet down.
They're coming up, and one day a blue whale surfaced right
next to the boat.
Like, six feet.
It was right here.
His head was bigger than my boat.
My boat was 20 feet long, and there was his head.
And this nostril, the blue whales have a splashguard that
looks a lot like our nose.
And it just came out of water, and a 30 foot
blow went right up.
And then you could hear this sucking sound, this cavernous
sucking sound, suggesting this great mass
underneath the water.
I mean, it was incredible.
Four times the size of our boat, and
my legs were shaking.
I was forgetting to breathe as I'm composing photographs of
this blue silverback rolling in front of me.
Through the viewfinder I could see a rainbow
casting this blow.
I could see my own shadow in the blow with the whale's body
right there.
And I thought, this is it.
After three years of effort, I've got something.
This is what I've been waiting for, and this was the photo
that came back.
That's actually what it looked like.
And it was the only time the film came back unexposed.
And I had decided, I've got to quit.
I started to go down the rabbit hole.
I don't have what it takes to keep exploring this, both
emotionally and financially.
And around the same time, I had already booked a trip to
the South Pacific to reacquaint myself with the
underwater world of whales.
And this was with humpback whales.
And I didn't want to go.
I couldn't refund it.
So I was there.
The whole time I'm there, I'm trying to figure out how to
rebuild my life when I get back home and stop all this.
And this a really horrible photo, and it just shows you
how difficult it is.
But it just really, it was in my third week in the South
Pacific, and it really just summed it up for me.
What's not really being convinced in this photo, it's
150 foot visibility.
That water is over 60 feet deep, and you can see the
boulders and all the features on the bottom.
You can see their shadow on the bottom.
And I thought, this is incredible.
It's like I was almost standing on the edge and
looking out into the abyss of what I was pursuing.
I realized to really explore this, you need
to do it full time.
And you need to be with these whale for entire seasons, up
to three months to see the full spectrum of behavior.
And also, the person left our group and is swimming after
the whale, trying to get photographs, and compromising
the encounter.
The whales are swimming away.
And that's very symbolic to me.
It's this mentality of scarcity.
And we impose it on ourselves.
We say, well, I'm only with the whales for two weeks, or
three weeks, so I must chase them, pursue them.
I've got to get the shot to either make this a viable
business of impress my friends.
And it's like, it's no, no, no.
You've got to decouple from that and just really be
willing to work on whale time.
And so that realization, to me, like, OK, this is it.
This is like, I'm looking out at the abyss.
It's like, do I want to keep going forward?
How do I be present for three months with this?
How do I do that?
I didn't know how, nor was I inspired to do it.
And I still wanted to quit, and it was an experience that
moved me to tears.
I was like, OK, I'm giving up on this, and I'm going to
rebuild my life.
And by the end of the day, that same day, I was with this
mother and calf.
And they were about to do something that would shine a
light on what I could offer, what I could create.
And it started with this whale here.
This little calf on the bottom is swimming up to me.
And they both kind of churned and came right up to me, and
the calf came up to me on a collision course.
He was just right at me.
And at the last moment he turned away, and I was using a
fish eye lens, which is traditional.
I don't use them anymore.
They're great for small books and calendars, and things,
where it encouples the whole whale's body in one photo.
And that's what I was doing.
That's what I was taught.
And I knew he was close.
And the fish eye makes him look far away, and I thought,
I'd better lower this camera.
He's going to hit my camera with his tail.
And I lowered the camera, and this was the
last photo I took.
And I remember being immediately just taken aback
by the sight of a belly button.
Literally just beyond arm's reach, going by me.
And seeing all of their true colors, and the
fine, subtle details.
And I remember appreciated his body, his musculature and
blubber, and skin just moving and flexing as he was powering
down one more time.
And he powered down.
And that fluke went right by my face like this.
And I was just in awe.
I mean, this was a five week old calf who has that kind of
mind body awareness in relationship to me, which, why
should he be concerned about me?
It was really humbling.
And I was sitting there trying to process the moment, trying
to see if there was something to this that I could pursue.
And another moment passed, and then I felt a single, just
solid tap on my shoulder.
And it was too solid of a tap to be human, and I felt dread
as I turned to look.
And it was the mother, and she had extended her 15 foot long
pectoral fin that weighs two tons, and she touched me with
the very tip of it.
And the camera was to my side, and I was eye to eye with her.
She was looking into my eyes.
And I immediately saw what was missing.
What I could offer.
Moments like this, on their terms, and on their scale.
She had this expression, it was a very calm, heavy lidded,
mindful gaze.
And it's very penetrating.
And it was a moment where the word whale just fails.
It's a meaningless word, and there's something else there.
And that was it.
I had the inspiration, and it took another year and a half
to find the courage to pursue it.
And here was the idea.
If you could see this little black dot, that's a very
generous representation of a digital sensor
on the biggest camera.
And the idea of putting all this information on one
sensor, on a 45 foot whale just seemed--
it wasn't going to work.
And I thought at best, you could focus on this area and
make a portrait, which is one of the things I do.
And I was really interested in seeing what happens if I turn
the camera on its side and just do a mosaic.
And that's what I began.
That's that direction I went and explored, and I hadn't
quit my job yet.
I was trying to live in both worlds.
I was trying to do this and keep my day job.
And this was a photo from my first season.
I sold my truck and all the camera gear I didn't need.
I raised enough money for five weeks, and to begin exploring
this process and learning.
And I came back with nothing.
I mean, this was one of the photos I created, but none
were life size.
And I learned a lot, and I was really starting to feel sad
about trying to keep both things going, and the
depression was really powerful.
And I remember being at my therapist's office, and she
told me something that you never want to hear your
therapist say.
She just looked at me one day, just said, I don't
know how to help you.
And this was a time where I was on the brink of being
checked into a crisis center.
And I just looked up at her, it just me.
I remembered that feeling I had when I had the first
inspiration.
I need to leave all this safe and familiar.
I need to pursue this.
And I told her, I need to quit my job.
And then just everything just drained.
I felt fine.
And that was seven years ago.
And so off I went.
I sold everything I owned.
I quit my job at a sea otter research lab.
I raised enough funding for 124 days of field work, and
this would allow me to learn and explore all the different
possibilities, to recreate that sensation I experienced
two years earlier.
This is a mother calf pair.
This is one of the whales I would see regularly, and this
is him as well.
His name is Beethoven.
We gave them him name because he would swim down to his mom
and his back on his mom's body, and wave his pectoral
fins like a conductor.
This was my one and only attempt to make a
composite at that time.
The whale on the right swam up to my friend here, and
immediately did a 180 and came right back at me.
And I took some photos.
Let's see if this works.
So those are some of the photos I took.
And you have to remember, I'm six feet away from this whale.
This is a small whale.
Probably 27 feet long.
Probably only like two years old.
Pectoral fins are right here.
I'm so close that the pectoral fin is going underneath my
body just by about this much.
And all I see is this wall of whale, and he's probably about
this tall, which a small for a humpback.
And your entire field of view is enveloped by this body, and
then you see this eye approaching.
I'm looking through the viewfinder here, and here I'm
watching him.
And this eye's looking around, and looking at me.
And sadly, what I learned from this experience was the sun
was in the right position.
It wasn't behind my head.
And what I've taken away from that experience is always keep
the sun at your back.
And that means if a whale comes up to inspect my feet,
even if it's six feet away, I don't turn to face him.
I keep my back to him.
And it requires a lot of trust.
And my feeling is that our eyes gravitate
towards each other.
And so I just hold the direction I want, and
hopefully they'll come around.
And they do occasionally, will come right up and look at me.
They don't like to look in the sun either, because their eyes
are very sensitive to light, but it's the only way these
photographs can be made.
They don't like strobes.
And this is Beethoven again.
The inspiration was really powerful.
It was to the point I couldn't ignore it.
So I'm doing my best to just follow it, and every step of
the way when you make all these big decision,s you quit
your job, you sell everything you own.
And you're like, well, how do I feel?
And it's like, no, I still feel good.
This is the right thing.
And there's no other choice, and I keep going.
But by the end of those 124 days, I had nothing, and I was
still learning.
And I was looking at the prospect of coming home with
nothing, and for the first time in two years, I was
thinking, I'm going to have to quit and rebuild my life.
This is insanity.
I'm just going so far down the rabbit hole now
that I have to quit.
And I had a sleepless night, I had just a few weeks left, and
I remember, I didn't sleep at all.
And just filled with anxiety, and just a lot of regret.
And we went back out to sea that morning, and within a
half hour, I reunited with Beethoven and his mom.
And his mom was about 60 feet down, and Beethoven was doing
the same old thing.
Rubbing his back on her.
And mom started to come up to surface to have a look.
And she got really close, and Beethoven swam off, and then I
lost track of him.
And I thought, uh-oh, where'd he go?
And mom was 12 feet down, and she just rolled up and looked
at me, and her eye went wide, and I knew something was up.
And then my body just moved forward at the
surface like this.
I'm on snorkel.
And I felt this pressure against my back and my head,
and I strained to look up, and I saw the underside of a whale
go over the top of my head and stop right here.
And I lowered my camera, and its pec fin came around, and
just went right against my chest and pressed me to his
belly, and we stayed there together and
breathed at the surface.
And I didn't want to startle him, so I just stayed there.
And my assistant was in the water, and she grabbed my arm
and just separated us gently, and we went back in the boat.
I've had strange events where I've wanted to quit, and then
something like that happens.
It's happened several times.
And the very next day, I composed what would be my only
life sized portrait of a whale during that time.
And this is another calf, a five week old
calf we named Mozart.
And when you learn something, you're learning, you're
developing, you're making a lot of mistakes.
When you're 6,000 miles from home, it's hard to just say,
well, I need this kind of lens.
I need a more portrait lens.
You can't just go online and get one from B&H Photos.
So you're kind of committed to the mistakes you've made with
the lens choices, and I realized the lens
I had was too wide.
I really needed something narrow, because the more
narrow the field of view, the more pixels per feature.
And that's really important when you want
to capture the eye.
And this, well, and his mom swam around me for 20 minutes.
Mozart had his pec fin out like this, and mom's dorsal
fin was like this.
So he's hitching a ride.
They're just cruising around, going around me, coming closer
and closer.
Finally they were underneath me, about 15 feet, and Mozart
just went like this and separated from his mom, and
came right up to see me.
He was less than three feet from my camera when I took
this picture.
And it's like he overcame all my mistakes, and I took this
picture, and that was it.
This was my last photograph from the season.
It's just me saying goodbye on my last day before I flew back
to the States.
And really, that portrait of Mozart was my only currency.
To print the amount of work, I had to sell my underwater
camera here and fully commit to this.
And started my first show eight months later, and really
just began the process of putting the work out there.
And during that time, it was a two year time
between field seasons.
And I thought about this whale a lot.
This is Mozart's mother, and this is probably 10 feet away.
And I thought, hey, look at this.
This is great.
I can make a life size portrait of an adult whale.
And when I zoomed it up, enlarged it, the
eye just fell apart.
It was just blobs of color.
And I realized I would have to be closer than 10 feet.
And that concerned me more than fund raising or getting
commissions than anything else.
And it took years to overcome that.
And it wasn't until 2008, I was invited to exhibit my work
at the International Whaling Commission meeting in
Santiago, Chile.
And this is the security detail there.
It's a very highly politicized, polarized event.
Can be pretty compelling and dramatic with the opposition.
And instead of being outside with the signs, I was able to
come inside with the work.
And we had an exhibition in the lobby where all the
delegates walked by every day to the conference venue.
Even invited, asked if we could include the portrait
outside the conference room where they have coffee.
And they said, it was with no text, and they said it would
be too controversial to have a portrait of a healthy whale
just there.
So that actually gave me hope.
This was a photo of the actual exhibit in the lobby.
Had a reception.
It was really an incredible time.
My last couple of days there I met this gentleman, Peter
Hall, who's the CEO of Hunter Hall Ethical Managed Funds,
who ultimately commissioned me to create my largest work.
And it would be the largest work I could create that would
be shown in Norway and Japan for the first time.
And so in 2009, I started this process with him.
And it's really simple.
It's what would happen with a 50 megapixel camera, a
portrait lens, like a 50 or 80 millimeter,
so it's very narrow.
And from six or five feet away from a whale's eye?
What would that look like?
And it's really exciting, but it's never happened before.
it's never been done.
And I just was really curious to see what would happen.
So Peter was able to make that possible, and right after New
Year's Day, as soon as the camera arrived, it was one of
the first batch of cameras that were sent out, I went to
the eastern Caribbean to work with *** whales.
And I was actually in search of a specific family known as
the Group of Seven, and in that family there is one whale
who is known to tolerate people in the water, and who
might even come close.
And Peter able to fund five weeks of field work, which is
a terribly short amount of time, but I was grateful.
And I thought, if I only have five, weeks I need to find a
whale that may allow me to create, finally create a full
body composite of a whale's body.
And I spent five weeks there, like I said, and I never found
the Group of Seven.
And I was looking at coming home with nothing once again.
And I went out, my last full day, and I saw--
during this whole time, I never found
the Group of Seven.
This was another whale, and I saw this whale over and over.
And it seemed like he was tolerating me more and more
every time we were in the water.
When I'm in the water, I snorkel.
I'm motionless.
I don't swim after them, I just observe.
And I want to allow them to explore any natural curiosity
they may have of me.
And this is what might encourage a very close
inspection, which is really critical to making these
photographs.
And this whale never came close enough, but on my last
encounter, he was about eight feet away.
And we just kind of swam together like
this, side by side.
And I would compose pictures, and he opened his jaw, which
normally is a threat display, but he shot out a squid
tentacle at me.
It was about this big, and about that big around.
And I regretted not taking it, because I thought maybe it was
stuck between his teeth, but it was too big.
And it just started to open my eyes about how you can
communicate intention with a whale, just by showing up
every day for three months, or five weeks, whatever you can
do, being respectful and consistent, and just being in
their presence.
And giving them the space to explore
their own natural curiosity.
So to have that consistency, visually, everything
I wear is the same.
Same boat, for the acoustics, to make sure they can become
familiar with that.
And that's what really inspired that.
And as I was saying earlier, on my last day of the five
weeks, I met this whale.
He's a two and a half year old calf, and his mom swam by very
closely to me.
Not close enough, again, but she kind of moved her tail
like this by me.
And I was like, whoa, and I took a picture of her tell.
And I was going home within days, and I
thought, OK, great.
I have a life size photo of a tail, or part of a tail, and
we'll just make it big and share it anyway, and just see
what I can do.
And she dove.
She dove to 1,000 feet, and was down for 45 minutes.
And this is her calf.
His name is Enigma, and I surfaced.
I came up to look around.
I saw a friend of mine.
We'd just became friends.
His name is Shane Gero.
He's a *** whale biologist who studies the social biology
of Peruvian *** whales.
And he just looked at me and said, very casually, this is
the Group of Seven you're with.
And I thought, OK, this one whale named
Scar might be here.
And hopefully this will allow me to make these big
photographs.
And I hadn't seen him yet, but Scar's
younger cousin was here.
And he finally was swimming around me.
His mother two and a half year old cousin was in the family,
too, nursing, so he didn't really have anything to do.
And the mothers and aunts share the nursing duties, and
they babysit while the mom is foraging.
So I just stayed motionless.
He swam around me.
He finally settled, probably five feet, six feet from me,
and he gave me his right profile, or his left profile
first, then left profile.
This is his left profile.
I hope you can see it OK.
And this was the first time that I was able to capture,
this is probably five feet away with an 80 millimeter
lens and a 50 megapixel sensor.
I was starting with 50, and I learned that 50
wasn't doing it.
But at the time it stopped working, so I had to switch to
another lens.
And that turned out to be the right choice.
And, yeah, I'm sorry you can't see the detail.
It's a little too dark right, now but I was really excited
just to see that.
And he gave me about a half hour sitting.
And so I composed 300 photographs of his body in
sections about this wide, and I took the 15 best photographs
and blended them together in Photoshop, and
I'll share with you.
Let's see if this works.
Is this going to do it?
Oh, there we go.
This was the first one I created.
I flew home within days after this encounter.
We had to build a computer that could complete this.
It's probably a 40 gigabyte file with all the layers, and
I think I was using maybe 200 gigabytes of memory, which we
would use--
that we would get that from scratch disks to handle it.
Takes like a half hour to save.
It measures 5x20 feet.
And I just had a lot of gratitude for this whale to
give me that opportunity.
After that happened, I met his cousin.
I had just got on the boat, changed my battery in my
memory card.
And I remember sitting out by the swim step, and I just
heard my skipper say hey, look.
Look down.
This whale was coming up to the boat, he was upside down,
which I speculate they could see with both eyes when they
present their belly, and gauge your distance.
And I got in the water, and he swam right under me.
And I remember picking up my legs, just going like this,
just to let him pass underneath me.
And I took this photograph, and he was preparing for his
foraging dive.
So he wasn't going to spend very much time
with me, and he dove.
And later in the day, I saw him one more time.
And this was my last encounter with him, and I'll
never forget it.
It's the encounter that comes to mind most of all when I'm
asked, what does it feel like to swim with a whale?
Let me show you.
This is what's going on underneath the surface.
This is all I could see.
He swam right up to me with his lower jaw open, which can
be a threat display.
So I wasn't sure what if he was testing me.
And his head's about this high, and about this wide.
He's a very small whale.
He's probably 24 feet.
I'm guessing 10 tons, maybe, or more.
If he fully matures, he could reach 70 feet.
Historically, that's how big they get.
And I remember feeling this dead again as his head loomed
closer, and it finally pushed up against my body.
And I remember putting my hand on a whale and touching a
whale for the first time, and pushing off.
And I remember being humbled just by the basic observation
of his body not moving when I push away.
And he then just heeled over 45 degrees and came forward to
meet my eye.
This is that right profile.
And as he came forward, his jaw was still open, and it was
open underneath my body.
I was flat, and I remember looking down, just making sure
that my feet were not going inside his mouth.
And he has a history of grabbing fins.
He's very tactile.
It's like an opposable thumb for him.
It's not anything malicious, but they will feel you.
And so I just stayed flat, and I wondered, what's going on?
Is he testing me?
And I realized, I had to take pictures.
So I just turned over my complete trust to him, and
started taking pictures of him.
The thing to think about with this whale, when I'm asked
what it feels like to swim with a whale, and to be this
close to a whale's eye looking at you.
I always think of this one encounter.
And the thing to keep in mind with *** whales, they're the
largest toothed predator on the planet, and they possess
the largest brain ever to exist on earth.
It's up to seven times the size of our own.
They're complex social animals who have been shaping their
culture and communication for over five million years in
their modern form.
So if you imagine a brain that size evolving culturally for
five million years, that's 25 times longer
than our fossil record.
Now, they're very complex animals.
And really, the only word that comes to mind when I
experience something like this, the only word that
describes it is that it's disturbing.
And it comes from the realization of realizing we
may not be alone in the universe.
That there's some intelligent, conscious life in the oceans
that we can't measure yet.
And all you have is this eye to eye exchange, and this
tangible knowing of something.
And really, that's why I create this work, is to
inspire that next generation of biologists, engineers.
Many disciplines, artists who want to know.
And I don't think enough of us want to know yet.
And with all the emerging technologies, it's my hope
that we can at least measure and know, because what really
concerns me most of all is the thought of losing over five
million years of evolving culture and communication, and
the largest brain ever to exist on Earth, and to never
know what we lost.
And that to me is the biggest tragedy.
Two years later, I reunited with him.
And this kind of gives you an idea of a typical workflow.
This is his head, this is his blow hole, his dorsal fin.
That's my head right there.
And he gave me a four minute sitting during this reunion,
and I composed 144 photographs along his body.
And this is what it looks like underwater.
This is my largest photograph.
Let's see if this works.
There it goes.
It measures 10x36 feet, has over 20 photographs in it.
It's a 60 gigabyte file.
have to keep flattening it.
It has probably 200 layers to it in Photoshop.
It uses probably 370 gigabytes of memory, which I supplement
by using solid state hard drives in RAID 0.
I'll use up to 12 of them to act as a scratch disk.
There's his pec fin.
You can see his digits.
They have figures like us in their pec fin.
And I haven't printed and mounted it yet.
It will be an original photograph.
I wanted to have the same feeling of impermanence and
fragility that they have out there, and I wanted to be
special for people that see it.
Digital's exciting, but for me it's the means, not the end.
And so I want to create some special with digital, but not
necessarily make it something else.
So, yeah.
Now we're getting to his tale.
When it's printed and mounted, it'll weigh 1,200 pounds.
And that's the other reason I haven't printed
and mounted it yet.
It needs a home.
Let's see.
During 2009, I was also commissioned to work with the
most heavily hunted whale in the world.
It's the minke whale.
This was on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
If any of you are interested in swimming with whales, I'm
happy to share information with you.
But I highly recommend the Great Barrier Reef.
There's only a five week window.
Nobody knows why, but the dwarf minke whales there
become incredibly inquisitive to boats and
people in the water.
And they do come up to you.
Very close.
This is a whale I spent five days with out of five weeks,
and as many as six hours in a day.
Let me share some more photos over here.
This is what's going on under water.
This is still Ella.
She is probably three feet away in this photograph.
I would wake up in the morning from our anchorage.
We're probably 15 miles offshore, and I'd pour a cup
of coffee and look out the porthole, and her dorsal fin
would go by.
And then another one.
And at times, there would be 14 whales circling our boat in
a figure eight pattern.
And most often, Ella would be in there.
And I'll share, hopefully these photos will show, OK.
This will also give you kind of an idea.
This is a portrait of Ella, a life size portrait.
This is 4x5 feet.
But the problem is the camera has one autofocus point, the
Hasselblad.
And so all the eyes are in the center picture, which isn't
really ideal.
And also, that one autofocus point focuses on particles, so
I've been eye to eye, a whale looking at me right here, and
it's focusing on all this stuff in the water, and the
whale's out of focus, and I'm in tears.
But you can just add another photograph and offset it.
And I'll show you a little bit of detail.
Hopefully it'll show up OK, but this gives you an idea of
just how much information is there.
This is probably my most detailed photograph of a
whale's eye.
That was Ella's left eye, this is Ella's right eye.
You can see it's really dark over here.
She's 4 feet underneath me.
I'm floating flat.
She's going like this.
That dark spot is the shadow cast from my body.
I had to wait for her eye to come out of my shadow to
compose that picture, and it was like 8:00 in the morning,
so the sun was really illuminating her eye.
Let's see if there's a little bit more detail.
After I took this photo, I was being transferred at sea.
I had to go to another boat, so I had to get out.
The crew put me on a skiff.
We went to another vessel, and I was shocked to see her and
about three other whales follow us to the other boat.
I immediately just grabbed my camera and went back in, and
kept photographing her.
This gives you an idea of the workflow.
This looks a little chaotic.
There are probably 15 photograph that I start with,
and they also look like this.
You can see all the layers that go into, all the
adjustments or the color adjustments, the tones.
All kinds of little photographs that you pull in.
Some I have to create.
Sometimes I have to create water from scratch, if I don't
photograph water by itself after the encounter.
This is the finished photograph.
This was at the Tamada Museum in Tokyo in 2010.
And I'll just do a--
oh, there it goes.
OK.
This photo is 6x30 feet, and it's my largest photo so far
that's been printed and mounted.
There's only one company in the United States that can
print and mount this size in a clean
room to archival standards.
And they're in New York.
So it's a big deal every time they're made.
You can see, like, all the flakes of skin on her body.
These are all the subtle things that make them real,
and that's what I explore with my work with whales.
Bringing out every subtle detail with them that make
them real, and really, what I want to achieve is I want to
give you a memory of what a whale really looks like.
Less than one millionth of 1% of the human population will
ever be eye to eye with whales the way I have been.
And so they're essentially reduced to words and small
pictures, and they're not really a part of our lives, or
they don't really move us in ways that they have the
potential to do so.
So that's a big motivation for my work.
So that last photo of Ella, these last photos of Ella were
taken four weeks before my very first
show in Oslo, Norway.
Norway's a country that commercially hunts whales, as
well as Iceland and Japan.
And Peter had commissioned my first exhibition there.
And the goal wasn't necessarily to end whaling.
That takes a tremendous amount of investment of time.
You have to be on the ground for years, doing
all kinds of work.
Work that isn't polarizing, though.
Sharing beautiful photos of whales, sharing stories.
And sharing in a way that you're allowing your viewer to
have complete freedom to explore their own curiosity
the way I do, I do the same with whales.
And you don't want to take that away from anybody, even
if it's in a country that hunts whales.
Because once you do that, you close the door to change.
Like, you become set in your ways.
And what was inspiring was the response.
The show, first show was only two days in Oslo.
We had 2,000 people show up.
Coverage on television, newspaper, magazine, online,
and it was all positive.
And we had a completely new dialogue about whales with the
journalists in that country.
Normally it's highly polarized with the NGOs that I've
partnered with, and we were all surprised that we could
have this different dialogue.
And mainly, they wanted to know how can you get so close
to a whale without them hurting you.
And the storytelling really became an important part.
And the same thing held true in Japan.
It just was really heartwarming to know that
whales can be received this way, and we perceive these
countries as not liking whales, and
realizing that they do.
And it just generates so much excitement, and it's given me
hope to draw attention to the far more serious global scale
issues whales face.
Whaling makes up less than 1% of what's killing them.
Commercial hunting of cetaceans, I should say.
Whales, dolphins, porpoises.
The number one culprit is fisheries bi-catch.
Entanglement in fishing gear, where over 300,000 whales,
dolphins and porpoises die every year
for our love of seafood.
And that's something I'm exploring ways to gently
introduce into our world, and the consequences of it.
One thing I'm working to do is create a full body, life size
composite photo of a living whale
entangled in fishing gear.
And that's something that, it's a major project that
safety is paramount, the whale's
well being is paramount.
A lot has to go into play, but it's really my goal is to make
this a visual reality that defies words.
My work is currently on exhibit at
the Museum of Monterrey.
It's the first time all these large photographs have been
exhibited together in North America, and it'll be up until
Labor Day of this year.
And I think that covers my introduction.
My book, "Beautiful Whale," is here.
It just released last week.
It's my first photography book, and I'm really excited.
I hadn't planned on doing a book, and was encouraged to
really consider it, and I'm grateful I did.
And I thank all of you for coming out today.
[APPLAUSE]
MALE SPEAKER: Particularly bad smelling minke whales?
BRYANT AUSTIN: Oh, no.
There's a story about the name.
it was named after a Norwegian whaler named Minke.
It was his name, and they were hunting blue whales.
I don't know when this was.
It may have been 50 years ago, and he said, oh, a blue whale.
And the crew found out it was the smallest, one of the
smallest baleen whales.
And they named it--
we're gonna, you know, name it after him.
It's a minke whale, so I think that's how it
started, is what I'm told.
MALE SPEAKER: So obviously, underwater photography is a
big Everest in the photography world.
It's very difficult.
There's a lot of equipment that's involved.
And what sort of advice do you have for people getting
started in that medium?
BRYANT AUSTIN: I would just--
I would--
it's scary.
There's two ways you could do.
You can immediately go into a way that's lucrative, that
produce results financially, and you can
just create that way.
Or you can go the other way, where you have an interest in
something, but it's not very well defined.
And you have this thing you want to achieve, and you just
have to be willing to say, I don't know.
And then just go and explore.
And just decouple from the financial pressure of trying
to make a lucrative photography career initially,
and just create and explore.
And it's OK not to know.
And my experience in doing that is that I've created
something way beyond my imagination.
And that's just, yeah, that's what I'd recommend.
MALE SPEAKER: You always see whale watching tours when you
go to major tourist areas.
What sort of guidelines should people be looking for in terms
of reputable companies?
Like, what should you consider when you're going on a whale
viewing experience?
BRYANT AUSTIN: They're so varied.
There are operators that don't behave very well, and there
are some that are very reputable.
It's different in other parts of the world.
Anyone that wants to either go whale watching, or swim with
whales, I have my business cards here.
Just feel free to email me.
I can send you information.
There are specific companies that I know all around the
world that are just very respectful of whales, and the
thing that is subtle about that, being respectful and not
chasing them, not pursuing them, not behaving badly,
which is so common, is that often the whales will just
come to you, and so there are operators I can personally
recommend in at least four countries.
So please, I'll have my contact information here.
So, thank you again.