Whiskers!

Whiskers!

Get up close and personal with a Steller Sea Lion and it's pretty much impossible NOT to be impressed with its crop of whiskers! If you really want those whiskers to stand out, then catching them with strong side-lighting (against a dark background) doesn't hurt at all! Side-lighting is probably my favourite form of direct lighting to work with when photographing wildlife - it can be tricky to handle during image capture (watch out - it's easy to blow out highlights with sidelit subjects!) and image processing (please DON'T overuse the shadow recovery tool!) but it can add great drama to your shots.

Back to those amazing whiskers. The more formal term for them is vibrissae, and they do have a sensory function. Each individual whisker is connected to multiple nerves, and they allow their "owners" to feel their surroundings by picking up tiny vibrations. Sea Lion vibrissae also are hollow, and appear to function as pressure sensors. Interestingly, they are oval in cross section, not round. Recent research has indicated that this oval shape, combined with the orientation they are held when the animal is swimming, helps minimize the vibrations of the whiskers themselves, thus reducing "self-noise" of the whiskers, and helping the animal to better detect important vibrations in the water that are caused by the environment nearby animals. Cool, eh?

I captured this sea lion image along the portion of the BC coast that is known as the Great Bear Rainforest. Tagging this region with the Great Bear Rainforest name has had many positive conservation consequences, but at the same time it can be easy to forget that there's a whole lot more than bears in "The Great Bear". Besides many other terrestrial animals (from wolves, wolverines, and martens), the waters of the region are chock-full of fascinating creatures, including 5 species of salmon, Humpback Whales, Killer Whales, Steller Sea Lions, Harbour Seals, and more (to name just a few!).

Subject: Steller Sea Lion (Eumetopias jubatus) posing in side-light
Camera: Nikon D4s
Lens: Sigma Sport 150-600mm at 600mm. Hand-held from Zodiac - OS On and in "OS1" mode.
Exposure: 1/2000s @ f8; ISO 1800. -0.33 stop compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.
Crop: Very minor - this is about 90% (or more) of full frame

A lot more info about this shot - including a 2400 pixel version of it - can be found here on my website:

http://www.naturalart.ca/galleries/latest/

Comments and critiques welcomed - probably best to view the larger version prior to doing so!

Cheers...

Brad

PS: Like all wildlife images on my website and that I post on NPN, the subject is fully wild and completely unconstrained. Besides the potential impact of my presence, nothing has been done to intentionally alter or affect the ongoing behavior of the subject and, of course, there has been no use of any form of bait or other form of wildlife attractants (including vocalizations)