Photo Tips San Diego Underwater Photographic Society

Surface Interval - Marine Mammals Topside
by Phil Colla

Over the past few years I have had the good fortune of photographing topside marine mammals often, usually in situations where I expected a particular animal and was prepared to shoot it as well as I know how. Occasionally, though, surprise opportunities aboard large dive boats have produced great frames: blue and gray whales and common dolphins. My many failures shooting marine mammals have led me to formulate a few simple guidelines that, for me at least, increase the chances that I will get something worth keeping.

Cop an attitude. If you want to photograph leaping dolphins and breaching whales, DECIDE to do it. Be prepared to burn a lot of film and throw virtually all of it away. Make time on the water a priority. On the way out or back, especially to Clemente in the summer, stay awake with camera nearby and ask the captain to alert you when he first sees dolphins. (Horizon and Odyssey captains Greg and Doug is great about this!)

Be prepared. Have your cameras ready with the right lenses and full film before the boat moves. Have extra rolls in your pocket. Take a meter reading, not when the dolphins arrive but BEFORE. If you have a choice, think about where you want to be to shoot hours before it happens. Bow -- shoot wide angle and hope for glassy water. Top deck, use an 80-200 or 300 to shoot leapers at 1/500 or faster. If it's dolphins then you probably will not have time to change lenses, so relax and trust that your choice was right. Common dolphins are the leapers, white-sided and bottlenose usually go straight to the bow and ride.

 Exposure. Often the water surface or the subject will fool your meter (even those chi-chi matrix meters), so compensation is typically needed. Neither bright gold sea lions nor little black seal pups are 18% gray, but the meter doesn't know this. I try to use like the Sunny 16 rule (f/16 at 1/ASA) and compare against what the meter recommends. Generally I spot meter so that clouds are +1.7 stops, the palm of my hand is about +1 stop, and the surface of the blue water is about -.5 stop. (Admittedly, I prefer my photos to be a little "high key" or bright). Sidelit whale blows: auto with a guess at underexposure. Backlit anything: auto with one to two stops overexposure and bracket like mad! Overcast days: automatic straight up, but this light is lousy anyway. Kodachrome handles the hot spots that occur with wet animals in bright sunlight, particularly wet pinnipeds, better than the E6 films I've used, although I still use Lumiere a lot. The dense coats of Guadalupe fur seals are at once almost black and capable of producing blinding hot spots in direct sunlight.

Focus. This separates my snapshots from my few sellers. I have never had success with autofocus with topside cetaceans, and only with pinnipeds when they are motionless. One too many times I have framed a perfect breach, only to have autofocus hunt as the whale peaked and fell back into the water. In a small bouncing skiff I find it impossible to keep the little AF sensor on the water precisely where the surfacing gray whale will blow. Become accustomed to focusing your telephoto manually and to anticipating where your subject will emerge from the water. Think and be deliberate! Watch the timing of the dolphin leapers as they approach the boat -- often it is similar from one animal to the next.

One last special pinniped rule. I have painfully discovered that, no matter what amazing behavior is captured on the film (elephant seal snot!), I toss the picture if neither the eye nor the whiskers are RAZOR sharp. TACK sharp. Enough said.

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