Adventures in Monterey Pt 1

On my way down to Carmel to meet Christian, among the hellish labor day weekend traffic, I made a quick stop at Jetty Road/Elkhorn Slough to take a look at the Sea Otters that frequent the area. I thought I only had about 20 minutes before I needed to get back on the road so that Christian and I would have a similar Carmel ETA. Turns out traffic was even worse for him and I could have taken longer and worked a bit harder to learn the camera and get better photos, but these will serve as try #1.

The otters were mostly sleeping in a big raft when I got there, so the opportunity for adorable action shots weren't there.

Rubbing eyes was about the most action these guys would do. A cropped shot where nothing seemed to be quite in focus. 

This one floated a bit away from the main raft and was the closest otter, but the bastard did nothing but backfloat

Foot tags abound

Wait, wait, an exciting eye scratch

Cute little critters that would eat your face off if you give them a chance.

Note: Edited for egregious typos

Chorus frogs come out at night

Speaking of the blog being in the dark for a while, how about a post full of pictures taken in the dark.  A couple of months back I took a free photography class with Chris Hartzell, in Monterey that focused on shooting frogs at night. It was a very informative and leisurely class, where I learned how to use my flash much better than I could before.

We employed two techniques, one taking images with a backlight and one without any other light other than that of our camera mounted or hand-held flashes. These led to two different kinds of images: (1) images with a lit green background or (2) images with a black background. I really liked the idea of the black background because it is so much more natural. It gives the viewer a more honest take on the environment that the frog was in. It was well after sunset and damn dark out, so why not let your image show that. It may not be type of image that makes the cover of Sexy Endangered Animal Monthly, but it shows the subject in a more natural setting.

Enough blabbing ... on to the photos.

No backlighting, just the dark night sky

A face cute enough to kiss

Full-frame with flashlight mediated backlighting

Doing a bit of calling

How about some color?

Thanks again to Chris