Last weekend I went out on a day trip, starting out in Moss Landing and ending up exploring the by-roads of Monterey County. The primary purpose was to do some experimenting on some gear I’ve been meaning to get comfortable with — my Better Beamer flash extender, and my new intervalometer. Moss Landing was a good place for this because I knew I’d have subjects, they were convenient to the car, and the lighting conditions are challenging — unless it’s overcast, the sea lion dock is generally covered with partially backlit, glare-filled light.
Much to my surprise, we had a cousin visiting:
That’s not a California Sea Lion, it’s a Stellers Sea Lion. He’s a huge beast, too; look at him in comparison to some of the California Sea Lions you can see in the picture — he’s like 4x-6x the size and weight of those guys.
His presence there was notable enough to get a blurb in the papers. At that time, I wasn’t sure what I had, but someone on the birding lists from Elkhorn Slough clued me in (thanks!). He was evidently seen in the harbor last winter for a short time, and was around for a few days when I happened to be there as well — he’s since moved on again, it seems, and hasn’t been seen since Sunday.
So nice timing. This is a species that generally lives north of here, although there’s now a small breeding population at Ano Nuevo and another on the Farralons. While there, his primary activity was — sleeping. This was one of the rare times he actually sat up, and if it’s not obvious, he’s scratching an itch. And then he laid out and went back to sleep.
And yes, as you can probably tell from this image, the lighting was challenging. And I still have work to do on my flash technique, but it was good practice at dealing with the beast. Oh, and complete trivia: this is the first image I’ve published using Lightroom 4 and their new processing engine…
Look at the whiskers on that guy. They are significantly longer than the california sea lion’s head.
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Stellers Sea Lion. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.