p.1 #1 · Monterey Bay whale watching. Help with lens choice ple!se
Hello everyone,
I will be traveling to San Francisco next week and will be renting a car to drive down to Monterey Bay to try and catch some whale watching. I would appreciate if anyone who has done this before can share with me what lens is most suitable. I will be using my 5DmkII, still undecided if I should carry my second body, 50D. my longest lens is the 70-200f4. Or will the 24-70 be long enough? I understand that the whales come quite close to the boats.
Besides whale watching is there anything else around the area that I shouldn't miss out?
p.1 #2 · Monterey Bay whale watching. Help with lens choice ple!se
Ryan,
Most of the time you will be needing the long lens. It is not very often that you end up close enough to them for the 24-70. However...that being said, the last two trips I took out of the L.A. area we had giant Blue Whales surfacing literally 10 feet from the boat! We had whale snot blown all over us two times. If it were me, I'd carry two bodies with each set up for the different length. I would set up the 50D with your long lens to take advantage of the 1.6 crop factor. When under way on the boat hang out in the very front if you can. The skippers tend to try to get up the the whales head first, and then turn sideways if they have whales that stick around. Then you can walk to the sides to shoot them. If you get lucky enough to have the whales feeding at the surface (Seriously cool to see!) I would try to get both super close and wde shots. You should be able to get just the whales head/mouth scooping up huge amounts of fish or krill.
