Harbor Seals, Tracy Arm, Alaska #3371

I am honored and pleased to announce my image of a pup and mother seal snuggling together on an iceberg in Tracy Arm is a winner in the National Wildlife Federation 49^th Annual Photo Contest. The judges edited through 29,800 images submitted by 3,200 photographers to pick 17 winners in eight different categories. This image won second place in the Baby Animal category and will be featured in the December 2020 issue of National Wildlife Magazine. USA Today and the Daily News in the UK picked up the story.
I am fortunate that during my first 14 years as a professional photographer I worked as a newspaper photojournalist. The hectic demands placed on a daily shooter covering multiple stories per day taught me to shoot fast, go light, and find the story-telling moment. My first trip to Tracy Arm was in 1979 on assignment for the Juneau newspaper. I immediately fell in love. I have probably been back to Tracy Arm well over 100 times in the past 40 plus years. Tracy Arm is one of the most important harbor seal pupping areas in Alaska. In May and June there can be hundreds of mom/pup pairs. I wanted to illustrate just how important this area is to the survival of harbor seals. There is no better way to share the hope of generational success than by showing the mom/pup bond. I pre-visualized this shot way back in 1979 and waited for the right set of circumstances to bring it home well over 36 years later. The round trip from Juneau to Tracy Arm is ten hours. The trick is getting back to Sawyer Glacier where the seals hang out. This means driving the boat through miles of icebergs locked in a large life-sized blended marguerita, not knowing if you are actually going to make it there. This time around we got through and floated for two hours in the ice slush. Most of the seals were too far away and the ice conditions did not let us approach any closer. As we were leaving the captain found a lead in the ice, and we started picking up speed. I was on the outside back deck and the captain was inside. The water was flat calm, the light was perfect, the reflection was unbelievable, and this seal snuggle was the moment that I had been waiting for all these years. The trouble was that the captain had not seen this pair and was locked into getting us home. I had no time to go in and ask him to slow down; I just had to swing and shoot. I shot wide open with my 80-400 Nikkor lens zoomed out to 400mm with my shutter speed set at 1/8000 of a second to hopefully freeze the motion for the boat. I blasted off about twenty frames before the wake of the boat broke the reflection. We left the pair still resting comfortably on their iceberg. As you can imagine, this image is very special to me. Hand-signed prints are available online, and as it happens, this image is featured in the month of May of the 2021 Alaska calendar. It also comes in a note card. Thank you for visiting and be well – Camera: #Nikon #D800, Lens: # Nikkor 80-400mm, Digital Capture, Handheld ©Mark Kelley