Swimming with seals can be one of the most exhilarating underwater experiences you can get: Sometimes referred to as ‘’puppies of the sea’’, they are incredibly curious, inquisitive and super playful animals that want to fully interact with you and let you become a part of their world.
The first thing you need to do, is find the best locations to swim with them, and in Australia we are very lucky to have some incredible places where the seals gather in their numbers.
Where To Swim With Them-
East Coast- Australia
On the East Coast, we have Montague Island in Narooma which has a year-round colony of fur seals. Narooma is located around 4.5 hours south of Sydney and is a stunning location for both swimming with seals and exploring the natural beauty of the New South Whales Coastline.
There are several operators here who run daily charters out the Montague Island (around a 20-30 minute boat ride from the shore), where you can spend 3-4 hours snorkeling or scuba diving with these incredible animals.
My favourite operator would be Narooma Dive Charters https://naroomacharters.com.au/snorkelling-with-the-seals/ who offer great service at an incredibly affordable rate.
Scuba Diving Vs Freediving
Whilst I prefer to scuba dive with a lot of animals, personally I would rather snorkel/freedive with Seals as a lot of the time they are grouped more on the surface and are generally more playful here too.
Whilst I have had some good scuba dives with them, there have been may times I have been looking up to the surface and watching the fun unfold whilst I was sat waiting for them to come and check me out.
The other advantage to being closer to the surface is – from a photography- perspective is that you will have more natural light to play with, which especially if you are shooting without strobes will make a big difference to your images.
Camera Setting For Natural Light and Strobes
For shooting with natural light, you firstly want to focus on your shutter speed. Often seals will move very quickly, darting past you at high speed.
Below is a photo taken without strobes where I used a 1/320 shutter speed. This large male swam over at full speed opening its mouth to warn me off. There is no blur in the image from the motion, however not all of the image is perfectly sharp. This however could have been a focusing issue rather than needing to up the shutter speed.
Once I have locked in my chosen shutter speed, I then want to look at ISO and Aperture and decide which one I will compromise on and change the most when I have changing light conditions. Ideally you should always try and shoot with your back to the sun, but when you are photographing in dynamic situations that may not always be possible and, if you have intermittent sunny spells when the light can be continuously changing throughout your dive.
Depending on your cameras capabilities, most cameras these days can shoot with a high ISO without looking grainy, I personally like to shoot around ISO 400-500, but would go higher if I didn’t want to compromise on my other settings.
For aperture I don’t like to shoot on anything less than F7.1, so I would always have that as my starting point when I get into the water and then work from there and when the sun is fully out- especially if I am shooting into the sun- then I would be looking at F12 and above.
Summary- Choose your starting settings based on the subject and conditions for the dive then decide which setting you are willing to compromise on and change.
I would start off with 1/400, F7.1 and ISO 400 and in dynamic fast-moving situations I am going to change my F stop only for changes in light to ensure subjects aren’t over exposed.
(If a shot is overexposed you are going to struggle to bring back the details in post production)
For shooting with strobes, the same principles apply however the shutter speed would be around the max sync speed with your strobes. For this you would have to check with your camera and strobe model. For me I would shoot seals around 1/200 and strobes would be on around ¾ power.
Lens Selection
Seals can often come very close, and as I said earlier they are very inquisitive creatures and can come right up to your dome port to check out their reflections: for this a fisheye lens would be perfect to get the seal fully in shot and give you the best chance of focusing on them.
However there are times where they can be a little more shy and a more wide angle lens, where you can zoom in and out will be more useful. My choice is the Sony 16-35mm GMaster lens
Focusing Options
This is one of the more tricky settings in my opinion for two main reasons: 1. you have a fast moving subject and 2. The seals can create lots of bubbles in the water which will make it harder for your camera to decide what to focus on.
See the image below, where the camera has focused more on the bubbles in the water around the seal, rather than the seal itself meaning the seals features aren't fully in focus.
Whilst the Sony A7IV has a pretty good tracking system for animals i found with the Seals it would start picking up on bubbles, particles in the water or even on parts of the seal I didn't want it to focus on. So i switched to a centre point focus and would concentrate on making sure the image was framed perfectly so my main area of focus was in the centre of the screen. The image below shows how that helped get the seals nose so sharp, despite the seal appearing from nowhere and me shooting quickly from the hip.
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