Diving with Baby Sealions
November 30th, 2007 by James
So the day after Christmas, I went diving again (by myself) at the Coronado Islands aboard the Lois Ann. This is my favorite boat/outfit to dive with in San Diego (local) because they have such great service, an excellently laid out boat, and really good food. Can you believe they fed us quiche for breakfast after our first dive! Captain/owner Randy also goes out of his way (burning expensive diesel) to do whale and dolphin watching between the islands and Mission Bay.
For those in the know, the Coronados are a great place to dive with juvenile California Sealions during the winter time. They hang out at an ampitheater on the inland side of North Island - called Lobster Shack after a long-gone lobster fisherman’s camp - and are literally ecstatic to see the boat pull up with their new toys. Diving with the Sealions at Lobster Shack is more like playing at Romper Room in a snow-storm. It’s not that great for photography. But luckily the Sealions are happy to follow the boat around and dive with you at other sites - like the Keyhole. This spot is on the Southern tip of North Island and has great terrain, lots of flowing eel grass, and some nice bull kelp too. This is where I think I got my best shots:
Some photographic notes: For these shots, I was using the Canon 24mm L lens and dual Ikelite DS200 strobes. I think that 24mm is almost the ideal lens for these guys, as they aren’t that big (4-5 feet long) They guys can swim so fast and move their necks even faster, and I found that stopping motion isn’t possible, even with shutterspeeds of 1/125th of a second. So I got a LOT of motion blur in my photos. Motion blur can be a GREAT thing, and can really be used to showcase the speed or energy of a subject in a photo, however I wasn’t able to get the motion blur I wanted. I attribute this to the fact that my Canon camera will not do 1st (or rear) curtain sync with underwater non-eTTL2 strobes 
This to me is a major fault of Canon cameras, because other brands have no problem doing rear-curtain sync with just about any flash. So your options are to pan with the Sealion - which is do-able but really hard - and which results in a sharp subject but a blurred background. If you want a sharp background and a sharp subject with a blur trail behind it, you need to use an eTTL2 converter so that you can get the camera to fire the flash at the END of the exposure. This is what I’m going to try next time…
December 23rd, 2007 at 4:59 pm
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