I’ve been commissioned to photograph portraits of many different subjects over the years, but he was my first cetacean. It was for a book of portraits that had been commissioned by a client in Dingle, and she wanted one of him as he was part of the reason she’d moved there nearly thirty years ago. He could be a little frisky and his love of bellyflopping beside small boats had ruined a fair few cameras, so I taped up my new one in a plastic Supervalu bag and brought an old, expendable one as back up. We didn’t get splashed, I got the shot and it ended up on the cover of the book, which by the end had expanded from an initial 50 portraits to 223, shot all over the world.

You can see some of my favourite shots from the book here.

There’s a terrific RTE news report about Fungie here, which uses footage from Tor Cotton’s documentary “The Dolphin’s Gift”