Found this photo among 700 seal shots I took one evening with my friend George Soules. We decided to tackle the problem of too many blurry seal photographs and only a handful of sharp shots. After many different permutations of settings and going past the seals so many times they stopped looking at us, we did come away with a few suggestions. In a nutshell here are the suggestions: using faster shutter speeds was paramount, the larger the zoom the better, shooting at shallower depth of field didn't matter as much, and cranking up the ISO when needed was okay. Now here's the strange part, my best seal shots disregard the suggestions. This seal getting ready to dive into the ocean was shot at 1/800 sec at f/7.1 with 400 ISO using a 300mm lens. Following these guidelines should result in more consistently sharper images when shooting seal from a moving boat. To learn how to create images like this, consider taking my sunset cruise photography workshop off Mount Desert Island.
EXIF data: Nikon D800, 300mm, f/7.1, 1/800 sec, ISO 400, 6/15/14, 5:39 PM
Pool's Open on Bunker Ledge, Mount Desert Island, Maine