Outdoors : He Captures Beauty in Bid to Save It : Nature photography: Rancho Palos Verdes resident travels the world seeking marine mammals, which also benefit from his success.

It was four years ago in the dead of winter when Bob Talbot, searching the Pacific Ocean off Dana Point for gray whales to photograph in their natural habitat, came across a large whale struggling in a fisherman’s drift net.

The situation appeared hopeless, Talbot recalled recently from his home in Rancho Palos Verdes.

“It was just completely entangled from nose to tail,” he said.

Talbot, armed with a knife clamped onto the end of a long gaff, could not get close enough to the whale without it getting excited--and further entangled--so he called for help.

A research vessel soon arrived. Four divers joined Talbot, who then grabbed his camera in an attempt to document the rescue attempt.

With the whale losing its battle against the mass of monofilament, Talbot handed the camera back and tried to assist the others in cutting the animal free.

But the whale sounded. The four others let go. Talbot, the only diver with a scuba tank, held on so as not to lose his place on the net.

“I can see exactly what I did wrong,” he said. “There were big looms of net hanging beneath the whale, and when he went down, the net went up and there I was. It came up over my tank.”

Talbot had become almost as entangled as the whale, the net having wrapped around his mask and regulator. He yelled for help as the whale lifted him out of the water and smashed him down again and again. The other divers could only watch as the whale tried to shake free of the net and Talbot.

“The worse he shook, the worse I got tangled,” Talbot said.

By then, a lifeguard boat had arrived on the scene, but its divers wouldn’t go in the water. It was too dangerous.

Finally, Talbot managed to unbuckle his tank and weight belt. His mask had already been torn off.

Another tug by the whale sent him down again. The net was still caught on his swim fins.

Fortunately for Talbot, one of the divers from the research ship finally dived in and was able to cut him loose. “He saved my life,” Talbot said.

National Park Service divers later saw the whale off Santa Rosa Island, dragging a length of net--and Talbot’s tank, regulator and weight belt.

“They must have wondered what happened,” Talbot said.

Such an experience might deter some people from closely involving themselves with the creatures of the sea, but Talbot is driven by a genuine concern for marine mammals.

The 1985 encounter with the gray whale is merely one he has had with many species, in many oceans.

There was the time last March when he was shooting pictures of humpback whales off Hawaii, looking with a distorted view through a 14-millimeter lens and camera housing.

“They came toward us and seemed a lot farther away,” Talbot said. “I’m looking and I’m focusing and then I feel this thump in my side, and I thought it was the guy I was with. I get kind of frustrated so I try to shake him away.

“But I look down and here’s this giant pectoral fin of this humpback whale that I’m on top of, and didn’t realize. I looked up and there’s this huge eye staring at me, and I thought, whoops! And she just kind of suspended me there on her flipper, almost to hold me at flipper’s length . . . and I just hung there for about 15 to 20 seconds.”

Talbot, 31, has traveled the world in pursuit of marine mammals, which he said “have this look in their eyes--a lot of presence”--that makes them more interesting than other animals.

But while his pictures typically show the creatures alive and vibrant in their natural habitat, almost all belong to a species in some sort of trouble, generally caused by man.

Last year, Talbot photographed pilot whales off Denmark’s Faroe Islands. The whales are the subject of an annual hunt during which they are driven into shallow bays and massacred.

“They’re slit with knives, kids stick their hands in the blow holes. It’s a big game for the locals,” Talbot said. “They’re even trying to set up their beaches so it’s easier to do it.”

Before that it was the harp seals of Canada’s Madeleine Islands, clubbed to death for their meat and snowy-white fur.

Next on Talbot’s agenda is a trip to New Zealand to assist environmental groups working to stop the killing of dolphins by tuna fishermen and their nets.

“They’re in real trouble over there,” he said.

What can one man and his camera do for a species in trouble? What does showing a dolphin in all its grace and elegance, leaping playfully above the ocean’s surface do for its future survival?

“What I’m mostly interested in doing is raising awareness,” Talbot said. “I target issues with posters, with a portion of money going to various groups.”

Said longtime friend and diving partner Tony Bernot: “You’ve got to get people interested first. If you did a poster, say of a whale tangled up in a net, nobody’s going to buy it. But by showing the animals at their best, it still allows people to see them, beautiful, in the wild.”

Talbot, who started selling his photographs on the street before his career took off in the early 1980s, now is able to donate money to organizations he believes in--those that deal with protecting the fragile marine environment.

Both the Sierra Club and the American Cetacean Society have benefited from Talbot’s work in one way or another.

He makes frequent donations--of time, photographs and money--to such organizations as the Marine Mammal Fund, Earth Island Institute and England’s Whale Conservation Society, which regularly uses his photographs.

Said Stan Minasian of the Marine Mammal Fund: “He spent two years in the Bahamas filming spotted dolphins in hopes he could sell footage. We were working on a film on the dolphin-tuna issue and he contributed everything he had--stills, movie, everything--to the project.

“Whenever we need a publicity photo or whatever, he’s there. And he’s been that same way with many of the environmental groups that he believes in.”

Talbot said: “You have to take into consideration the suffering on the part of the animals. Not that the oceans are any more important than the homeless or any other animals or anything like that--they all need help.

“It’s just that it’s what I chose to work on. Basically, all our life comes from the sea--the air we breathe, a lot of the food we eat and even in a roundabout way the water we drink. We screw that up, and we’re done.”

Talbot has been interested in the ocean and its inhabitants since he was a child. Growing up inland in Eagle Rock was a minor inconvenience. He and friends such as Bernot and Chip Matheson still found their way to the beach as often as possible.

“We went diving every weekend,” said Bernot, who still assists Talbot on occasion. “We rarely ever missed--even went it was rough.”

Bernot’s inflatable boat and an underwater camera got Talbot started.

“I got the camera as a gift and thought it’d be fun,” he said. “I had a little bit of a knack for it, and one thing led to another. I started doing this stuff when I was 14.”

That “stuff” entailed photographing whales off the Southern California coast plus an occasional trip to Monterey for sea otters.

But after graduating from high school Talbot decided to get serious. He wanted to swim with killer whales.

“We wanted to see orcas in the wild. That was our big dream,” he said.

Off he went with fellow teen-agers Bernot and Matheson, with a little bit of money, an inflatable boat and trailer, and two cars filled with equipment. Destination: British Columbia’s Johnstone Strait.

After bouncing over an unpaved road for several days after crossing the U.S.-Canadian border, they finally arrived and set up camp in a tree-house built on a small island on the strait.

It was several more days before any killer whales were sighted, and when they finally entered the strait, the three remained in the safety of the boat, photographing the whales on the surface.

The next day, however, Talbot jumped in. Bernot and Matheson followed.

“It was really incredible. Being that age (19) and trying something that not a whole lot of people had done,” Bernot said, adding that any fear of the animals disappeared immediately after the first encounter.

Talbot’s reaction: “We got in the water with orcas, at just 19 years old. I was just blown away. Of all the creatures I’ve photographed, they’re still the most awe-inspiring.”

In one instance, Talbot found himself being circled by a small pod of whales for several minutes, before they closed in.

“They just started coming in closer and closer until they were circling right on him,” according to Bernot, who was watching from the boat. “(Talbot) emerged with incredible footage.”

Talbot’s photograph of the four whales surfacing at dawn, blowing high into the air, graced the cover of Audubon magazine. American Photographer picked the photograph as one of the 10 best that year.

Soon after that, Talbot approached Karl Bornstein of the Santa Monica-based Mirage Editions, who took one look at his work and thought there might be a demand for such photographs.

There has been ever since.