'The moment I made eye contact with a whale'

In a series of striking photographs, Marcia Riederer captures the elegance and curiosity of the elusive dwarf minke whale.

A whale the size of a large van stared directly at Marcia Riederer as it circled the rope she was holding onto in the water. "It felt like time slowed down… like it was looking into my soul," recalls Riederer. "Its eyeball was the size of my head and it was really looking at me."

Riederer, a Brazilian photographer, had a life-changing experience in June 2023 when she made eye contact with a dwarf minke whale in Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

"I had goosebumps. It was an intense and just amazing feeling," she says, adding that she cried during the encounter. "I felt like I'd been chosen because it came straight to me." 

Riederer captured this powerful encounter on camera. With its fine details and smooth lines, her black-and-white image more closely resembles a drawing or watercolour painting than a photograph. 

For her eye-catching photo, Riederer was named best fine art photographer at the prestigious Ocean Photographer of the Year awards in London in September 2025.

At the awards ceremony, judge and deep ocean photographer Laurent Ballesta said the word that immediately came to mind when he saw Riederer's photograph was "harmony".

"The author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, said that 'a work of art is perfect not when there is nothing else to add, but it is perfect when there is nothing to remove'. And this is so true of this image," Ballesta said when presenting Riederer with her award. "There is a kind of gentleness. When I see it, I would just like to sink with it."

The Great Barrier Reef is the only place in the world where dwarf minke whales are known to congregate predictably each year, during June and July. Alastair Birtles, a professor of marine biology at James Cook University in Australia, has spent more than three decades studying these whales and says we still know very little about their behaviour and migration patterns.

"Nobody knew they were in the Great Barrier Reef until the 1980s," he says. Birtles thinks the whales gather along the outer edge of the reef each year to learn to court and mate.

"We see mixed groups of mature males and females and they and the many adolescent animals are doing belly presentations to each other," he says. This is when a moving whale turns on its side and presents its white belly to another whale – and sometimes to a person or object such as a dinghy.

Belly presentations are a courtship behaviour but they also allow the whales to utilise their binocular vision and get a better view of their surroundings. When interacting with humans, Birtles believes the whales move in this way because "they're wanting to get a really........

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