This was a complicated image to make. This image needed lots of attention of its composition, lighting, and action to make it effective.

I consciously applied none of it.

The situation was terrible. I was shooting these seals in noonday sun at a beach near San Simeon California when right in front of me, a large fully grown male decided to be a bit frisky with this new mother. Unfortunately, I was conducting an experiment and modified my normal technique by setting the camera's exposure manually to deal with the predominate lighting situation. It was part of my attempt to maintain control over my image's exposure instead of depending so much on the variabilities of my camera's fully automated features. When the action started to develop and this male began to climb over this little fellow's mother, I just swung the camera into action instinctively and shot image after imagve without changing any of the camera's settings. End result; serious underexposure by almost two stops.

Fortunately, the Nikon D-series cameras are extremely flexible. While not entirely flawless, they offer tremendous post processing capability when using their RAW format. Essentially, this format preserves the basic CCD imager data allowing you to make small tweaks to White Balance, Tone, and Exposure "after the fact". If you make a White Balance mistake when the image is made, you simply have to apply the correct settings "after the fact" to get the image right. Its powerful technology but it does have limits.

I had easily set my camera two stops underexposed for this situation. To maintain my high shutter speed, I needed to shoot at ISO 800 instead of ISO 200. The only way to fix the image was through the magic of post processing by adding two stops of exposure before attempting to work the image in Photoshop. As powerful as this "after the fact" technology is, there are limits. Some of the image quality was lost through the adjustments and materializes as noise, or "grain" in this case. Fortunately, I think the grain adds to the drama of the image with the flying sand and the image's "gritty"--sorry, I couldn't resist--nature.

Let me tell you wants going on here if you find it hard to figure out. The large body to the left is our big male. He weighs over 5,000 lbs and is on top of the 2,000 lb female on the right. You can see her tatoo. Our little guy is stuck between these two behemoths. Even though it's hard to imagine that anything so small as a newborn pup could withstand being smooshed by such large creatures, it appeared that after his mom squeezed away from her suitor, the little guy just curled up and went to sleep without any serious side affects. These kinds of sudden developments between males and females were quite common the four days I spent watching them. I have heard of serious injury being inflicted on the little guys during these tussles so an experienced mom will move her newborn pup to quieter parts of the beach to avoid these unwanted advances.

This image is a small example of the tremendous excitement anyone can experience near San Simeon.

Cheers

Tom