Early in December I sent out a round-robin e-mail to many of the SOSF project leaders asking for images of them we could use in the 2008 Annual Review (a publication we produce every year that compiles the achievements and progress SOSF projects). I’ve spent a lot of time in the field with many of the project leaders and its always nice catching up with people and hearing how their work has progressed. I had a very interesting response back from Dr David Rowat, a marine biologist and SOSF project leader based in the Seychelles. He told me that in early January he was heading off to Djibouti with a small team to research aggregations of juvenile whale sharks that occur there every year. The behaviour and research sounded fascinating, and the location fits nicely with some long-term film projects we’re currently developing. I contacted Tom Peschak, chief photographer for SOSF, to see what his thoughts were, and sure enough he shared the same opinion and thought we should go along with David.
And so its decided, in less than a month myself and Tom will head to Djibouti to spend the first two weeks of 2009 aboard MV Deli, a wooden schooner that has been converted for use as a live-aboard diving vessel, and we will be filming and photographing the aggregations of feeding juvenile whale sharks. We’re now starting to look more closely at what unique behaviour we can document on this shoot.