About the Image(s)

Shot with a Fuji XT5 camera at 1/320 sec at f 6.4, ISO 500, focal length 75.4 with a 70??“300 mm lens. Taken about 8 am on the stretch of beach where Elephant seals give birth annually, close to San Simeon, CA. You are not allowed to go on the beach but have to take photos from a walkway adjoining it.
My goal was to capture elephant seal behavior. These two juvenile females were a little distance from the main area where the mature females were giving birth and nursing pups. Their interaction caught my eye, especially this trumpeting in unison. I deliberately left apace around the edges for future cropping.

Editing: I ran the raw version through DxO raw to eliminate noise and enhance sharpness. In Lightroom, I then played with the global sliders-exposure, contrast, highlights, shadow, whites, blacks, clarity, dehaze, and vibrance. I removed the piece of whitened driftwood to the left of the head of the top seal that was quite distracting, and also removed a piece of orange kelp to the right of the same head for the same reason. I decided to zoom in more on the front half of the seals and to rotate the angle to be a little more interesting, using the crop tool. To separate the seals a little more from the sand and make them the lightest element to draw the eye, I masked the lighted sand areas with a brush and toned them down. I then added a light vignette for the same reason.

Finally, since the seals were very close in color to the sand, I decided to see if eliminating the color would yield more textures and make the seals stand out more, so I exported the adjusted image to NIK Silver Effects and chose #023 wet rocks as the one that I liked the best. It really brings out the textures in the seals and the sand.