One dad-to-be got a thrilling surprise as he photographed his very pregnant wife along the oceanfront recently: a dolphin breaching in the background — at the exact moment to be captured in the maternity shot, seen above.
“Someone started yelling to us that there were dolphins, and we could see their dorsal fins,” Dan Mozer, 30, a financial business analyst in Jacksonville, Fla., tells Yahoo Parenting about the Saturday afternoon photo shoot with his wife, Angeline, at Atlantic Beach. “Then out of nowhere, this thing just jumps out of the water.”
He adds, “When I took it, I was like, oh my god! Unfortunately, she totally missed it.”
Angeline, a 31-year-old human resources manager, is expecting their first child, a boy whom they’ve named Courtland Thomas. The baby’s due date was Jan. 27, so the photos, snapped to send to their families up north, capture Angeline’s belly at full term. The couple sent the winning shot to their local news channel, News4JAX, which in turn posted it on Instagram, where it’s gotten more than 580 likes and a steady stream of happy comments (and a few skeptical ones, such as “Ahh. The magic of photo shop!!”).
The series. | Image Source: Dan Mozer
“We had tried to take maternity photos the week before, but it started raining,” Dan says. But when Saturday turned out to be gorgeous, they headed out to the beach. Since they’re new to the area, they’d not yet seen dolphins at that spot, but locals told them it’s not an uncommon sight.
Because they’d been given the heads-up from fellow beachgoers, he explains, “It really wasn’t random — we saw their fins and I was waiting for them. I had set my camera on ‘burst,’ so there’s a series of three.”
Still, the mammal’s full leap was still a surprise — especially when it happened twice in a row.
“The dolphin actually jumped twice, but I liked the first jump picture best,” Dan says, laughing. “How quickly I forget how magical a dolphin jumping out of the water is! Now I’m picking my favorite jump!”
The way they see it, he says, Courtland was “summoning the dolphins” that day. “And no,” he adds, “we’re not changing his name, as some have suggested, to Dolph Finn.”
