Elephant seal portrait

[Alan Lillich]

Taken on the beach at Gold Harbor, South Georgia Island. The light was soft and this sleeping elephant seal gave me a chance to study the skin on its nose. I think I should have raised the ISO and gone to f/9 or f/10.

1D-IV, 70-200 f/2.8 at 182mm, ISO 400, 1/160 at f/6.3 in aperture priority, handheld while lying on the sand.


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[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Alan, I would agree on your self assessment that you needed more DOF, but then you ahve to up your ISO as you say, but sadly for me the tight crop isn't really working.

Always a shot like this can be tricky in many respects and occasionally what we see in the viewfinder does quite translate on screen and we ALL have been there :w3, but that is just my take, others I hope will chime in too and post their thoughts & views. In addition I think it looks just a little washed out/flat in both tone and depth. I would suggest you can either go back and adjust in RAW which will give you a greater/better result, or tweaking as I did with Levels, Curves and a couple of Channel layer adjustments, but it does hammer the pixels.

TFS
Steve

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Alan - I have to agree with Steve on this one and with your self-assessment for more dof. These types of shots are often tough to bring to fruition.

TFS,
Rachel

[Clemens Vanderwerf]

Alan, with such a tight crop you should have at least included the full eyes and mouth as they look kind of cut off/clipped. The distance between the front part of the nose and the eyes for example is roughly 8 to 10 inch which is quite a lot to get both sharp at such a close distance to the subject. You should have stopped down probably to f18-f22.

[Morkel Erasmus]

nice textures on this guy's nose, I agree with Clemens though that I'm missing the eyes and mouth, even if they would be OOF - it just frames your point of interest so much better...I actually had to look closely to see what was going on here - I think having a bit of a wider frame would give the viewer context earlier in the viewing process.

[Alan Lillich]

Thanks all. Steve's color adjustments are a big improvement. My original comment about DOF was not to get the eyes sharp, just more of the nose. That and the framing were meant to put all the attention on the nose texture. You can't see it in the web JPEG, but the texture is even better when you can see it all (like in a print). I've added a small 100% section. I see Clemens' and Morkel's points about the eyes and mouth. I guess I should have been closer with a wider lens, but lying on the beach 5 or 10 feet from a bull elephant seal is probably not conducive to a long life. I didn't want just a flat nose closeup, that didn't have enough context for me.