I pointed my camera towards the spot where the humpback whales had last surfaced and waited. It didn’t look glamorous by any means, but it meant I was far less likely to fall in. Aside from the occasional slap of swell against the boat I couldn’t hear a sound. It was a strange sensation – sharing a fjord with such massive animals and not knowing where they were. For all I knew they were right beneath us.

A flash of silver caught my eye and I looked down to see a herring spring out of the water within an arm’s reach of me. My heart squeezed as two more fish appeared. After that brief warning, four colossal mouths burst out of the water mere feet from where I was squatted, now frozen to the spot. This was a lunge feed – the humpback whales had trapped the fish against the surface and were now enveloping huge shoals in their rippling throats and filtering water out through their baleen plates. It all lasted a mere few seconds, and just before the whales sunk back under, I broke out of my paralysis to finally take a photo. My telephoto lens was far too cropped to capture the sheer vastness of the scene in front of me. Moments later the frothing water was the only sign they’d been there. I was shaking.