Photo Tips San Diego Underwater Photographic Society

Photographing Marine Mammals by Herb Gruenhagen

When photographing marine mammals you need to be respectful of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. This act makes it illegal to harass a marine mammal. Harassment is interpreted as human activity that changes the behavior of the animals. Thus, the entering a seal rookery or hauling ground or the close pursuit of a whale with a boat are violations of this act. Having just said that, we all probably violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act on our last dive trip aboard the Horizon. We entered a seal lion rookery at Santa Barbara Island in order to photograph these big, fast moving critters. We all had our wide-angle lenses on and began shooting pictures of dozens of these playful marine mammals. They came at us hard and fast, faking bites at our strobe lights and strobe arms. We all had a single thought of capturing that perfect portrait image. This image would communicate to the viewer the wonder and personality of a seal lion. The eyes are of any marine mammal are important to keep in focus. The whole image will fail if the eyes are not tact sharp. We as humans relate to any animal by looking first for the eyes.

Even when looking at an invertebrate a novice viewer will always wonder, "where are the eyes?". To give that image both power and impact, shooting up is always a good first step. This gives the animal the look being larger and thus more exciting. Shooting down on a subject has a tendency to make the subject smaller. For that look of motion, shoot your subject at an angle at around 45 degrees is always good. This makes the composition more interesting. Shooting the subject sideways makes the image look static. If you don't have the visibility or light, consider shooting with two strobes. In order to produce soft shadows on one side of the animal's face and highlights on the other, power down one strobe. If you have good light and good water visibility, then a fill light is all that is required for good color saturation. Shoot lots of pictures. Bracket your exposures and move the camera around producing both horizontal and vertical shots. Shooting images of marine mammals is both fun and exciting and challenging.

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