Taken Feb. 13, 2008 at Piedras Blancas on central California coast, as fog was lifting at about 7:30 am. Nikon D200, ISO 320, Nikkor 70-300mm VR, 240mm, f/8, 1/40 sec., handheld (VR on).
The younger bulls (as this one is, as shown by his short "trunk" and moderate neck scarring) are roughter on the females, who arrive at the rookery pregnant, give birth, and leave pregnant again. Pups are eventually left to teach themselves to swim.
Nice behavior and good explanation to go along with it.
It would be great to see your techs. There is a lot of motion blur in the female, and it looks like the focus missed the eye of the male.
I'd be tempted to crop tighter to get rid of the partial critter in the lower left corner since both ends are clipped. Some sharpening on the male's face would help, but won't totally cure a missed focus point.
I have looked at zoomed-in images from the RAW file and I cannot find anything as sharp as the bull's eye, which does not look so bad as the whole image suggests. Thus, I think the camera focused where I put the hot spot and that I either have a little motion blur on him, or exceeded what the VR can do (1/40 of a second at 240mm is pushing even Nikon's VRII too far), or both. Living with more noise at a higher ISO than 320 and processing it out would have been a better choice even with the D200's somewhat noisy sensor as dropping this lens to f/5.6 (its biggest aperture at a 240mm focal length) from f/8 is an especially bad idea, by my experience, at least past 200mm. The quality of my earlier photos (this morning) on a tripod shows a few sharper but missing interesting behaviors. These require running back and forth on the long walkway above the e-seals! I have decided that the tripod or even a monopod is not a good option for me on this subject.
Thus the image is not sharp enough for the amount of cropping to remove the almost-black pup. However, the little ones are all over the place during mating season, usually clinging to their mothers, so getting a shot of the females without the pups is unusual.
Have you considered a BushHawk? I can't speak from experience yet (just ordered mine) but a lot of folks recommend them for stability in a fluid environment.
Looks as though you are backfocused here. Look behind the flipper of the bull at the sand.. That seems to be your focus point. My biggest problem with tis image is the pup in the FG, it's cut off in a very bad spot. Needed to go a little wider to include the pup. The seal in the BG doesn't bother me as much. You needed more shutter speed as well. Bumping up the ISO or opening up the lens would have accomplished this...