A Boy and his... Whale.

Some shoots are just fun... period. And some shoots are beyond awesome. We always knew that we needed a Sea World shot. When we got in contact with them, they graciously allowed us to shoot our dancer with Shamu. Since we were going to be near the water (and the nefarious Splash Zone), I decided that it would be best to take a male dancer, rather than a ballerina in a tutu.

The images that you see are all pics that will not appear on Trystan's webpage. I like the first two because of the choreographed architecture between Trystan and the whales. But just like we needed to have Trystan's face in the pics, we also needed his dance partner's.

I particularly like this twisty one. We took these after the Labor Day weekend and the whales had just started a lighter "show" schedule. Because of this I think they were especially playful, because they were "on vacation" after their 4 show days in the summer.

As their wonderful trainers told us, you pretty much "suggest" to a killer whale what you want it to do. Lucky for us, 3 of them wanted to play, including Baby Shamu. Its too bad that this isn't a video, because he was pretty adorable for being a fearsome marine predator. He kept smiling, sticking his tongue out, blowing bubbles, and even spinning around doing underwater pirouettes.

Finally, when we were done and ready to jet off to the Shark Encounter, one of the trainers asked us if we wanted to hug Shamu. Well, how could we refuse?