Ribbon Seals & many others!

My main hope on this expedition was to see a ribbon seal. I'd had go back to my cabin this morning for another memory card as I'd been getting a 'Memory Card Error' message so had to replace it pronto. While I was away the pack ice that a ribbon seal was resting on had come alongside the ship and it had proved to be a wonderful photo opportunity. I arrived in time to see it diving into the water! I can't tell you how disappointed I was.

However, my disappointment turned to elation after lunch as the pack ice thickened dramatically, and with it came an abundance of all sorts of seals; ribbon, lada, ring, harbour and bearded. It was more a matter of choosing which seal to photograph! The leader of the expedition had never seen anything like it, nor the Captain. Plus, we even saw a Stellar Sea Eagle sitting on an ice column. Yay! So much for our afternoon landing; it went by the board.

I managed to use my Nikon D610, using Manual Focus entirely as it was too difficult with Live View to focus on what I was trying to identify; hope that that makes sense! I was really pleased and relieved that quite a few images really were sharp, in spite of everything being shot at 200m x 1.6 (had set the camera on the crop factor, to get extra 'length').