Ningaloo Reef is Western Australia's crown jewel, every bit as captivating as the much more well-known Great Barrier Reef on the country's other coast, but considerably less crowded and more pristine. Due to its remote location in the far northwestern part of WA, it's a bit of a challenge to get to -- but worth every effort. The region's principle draw is the annual arrival of the whale sharks, one of the best areas of the world to encounter these magnificent creatures in the wild. Whale shark season runs from April to June.

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Many photographs of whale sharks hide the fact that there is a lot of movement when they were taken. The whale sharks are wild animals and are not sitting still in the water motionless, posing for pictures. They are often coursing through the ocean at a fairly quick clip, and snorkelers are madly kicking their fins in an effort to try to keep up. I like the three shots below for their unavoidable slight blur and thus more accurate representation of what it was really like on the water trying to take pictures of them. Not the easiest thing to do!

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Rules are strictly enforced that one cannot approach closer than 3 meters to the front or sides of the shark or 4 meters from the massive tail in the back, but the temptation to reach out and try to touch one as it passes by is too great for some people to pass up.

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Whale sharks have complex pattern of camouflaging spots and stripes on their tops and sides. The pattern varies from shark to shark and is often used as a means of identification to track the travels of particular specimens. If you're lucky enough to have one swim directly underneath you like this, the view of these patterns is breathtaking.

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Too often I found the subject of my photograph to be far too close to fit it all in one shot. In an attempt to capture the massive scale of some of these creatures, I decided to try a poor-man's panorama shot by splicing pictures together -- not the easiest thing to do with the swell on the ocean's surface pushing me up and down as the shark swam from left to right in these pictures. All that movement led to tons of blurry results before I finally got this sequence in focus. A lone snorkeler on the other side of the whale provides a glimpse of my relative position when I took these shots, which is why the back half of this composite is slightly larger than the front portion.