38Talk:

I get a kick out of photo analysis, so humor me here...

I've noticed that two of the 'wow' photos are nearly simultaneous, separated by maybe half a second or even less, taken from dramatically different vantage points. The first was posted early in the morning on July 13 at mysticseaport.org, and it must have been taken on Saturday, July 12, perhaps by a photographer aboard the Morgan or the Mystic Whaler from some considerable distance:

I wondered when I first saw it whether this was a photo of one whale or two.

If we look at this second photo, below, apparently taken from aboard Rena, you can see the fluke of the larger whale, probably the mother, towards the right, and the rest of her faintly visible below the water, and toward the center of the frame, the smaller whale, probably her calf. Notice that the positions and poses of the crew in the whaleboat are exactly the same in the two images. I can't detect any differences at all! The first photo must have been taken at almost exactly the same instant from a lower vantage point far to the left ("left" as seen in the second photo) looking over the whaleboat towards the pair of whales beyond it. The flukes on the left behind the whaleboat in the first photo are the mother's and the body and dorsal fin on the right in the first photo are the calf's.

Given the huge number of photos and video being captured, I would imagine there are quite a few near-simultaneous cases like this. In fact, there's another vessel just out of frame in the second photo here. You can see its shadow and a little reflection of it in the water towards the upper right of the image. Did a photographer aboard that vessel capture this exact same instant?

Frank Reed
ReedNavigation.com / HistoricalAtlas.com
Conanicut Island USA

PS: small point: this appears to confirm what I noticed previously. The images labeled as "July 13" in the gallery at mysticseaport.org are actually from July 12.