A Tip For Shooting Organisms In the Intertidal Zone

The intertidal zone can present many challenges for photographing small marine organisms, but the first challenge is simply finding them. There are some locally common species which can always be easily found. However, after a few intertidal excursions, one may be looking for locally somewhat rarer subjects. Before you can hope to find the rarer ones, the organisms have to be there, in the first place. Occasionally they are everywhere, and often they are seemingly all absent... and which way it will be on a given outing can be difficult to predict before heading out.

One pattern that seems fairly consistent and predictable for abundance of rarer species is as follows:

First, there must be a large storm surge from a passing offshore storm. Next, there must be a significant minus tide. When these conditions occur, in immediate succession, the surge pushes the deeper ocean creatures into the intertidal zone, and then the minus tide temporarily traps them in the tidepools. The reason that an offshore storm works best is because an onshore storm will create sediment filled run off into the ocean, which will make the water turbid, which makes good intertidal photography much more difficult.

This may seem like an obscure set of conditions to hope for, but, from my experience, it happens at least several times per year (at least, in my area... the central California coast). If you keep track of the low tides, and pay attention for storm surge warnings, it is easy to figure out when conditions will be best for a tidepool foray.

This sunflower star is an example of an animal that is common in deeper waters, just offshore, but usually avoids the intertidal zone. Thus, sunflower stars are locally a little more unusual in tidepools than what would normally be around. This one got trapped in the tidepools from the kind of conditions described, above.



Mike

www.mikespinak.com

ahhh, Is that why whenever I go looking in rockpools I find nothing! Thanks for the information! Although I live a little to far from the ocean to go drive down there when I see these signs, but it is good knowledge to have for future reference.

Thanks!

Great tip! Something I never would have discovered on my own.

Thanks.

--John

Cool... I saw last weekend that it was gorgeous out in Monterey but that the surf was quite strong -- too strong for diving @ Lobos anyway. Is this the sort of condition you describe?

Hi, Kevin,

That's not exactly the sort of condition I'm describing. Point Lobos often has dramatic, pounding surf (remarkable, really), but storm surge is a particular situation when the wind from a storm piles water up and pushes it toward the shore. It tends to bring more water, farther inland, than a normal pounding surf does, but does not necessarily cause large waves.

Regardless, this past Saturday had great conditions for intertidal photography. Here's a side-view of a wine plumed spiny doris (Acanthodoris nanaimoensis) that I photographed on Saturday morning at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve:



Taken with a 180 f/3.5 macro lens and a 1.4x teleconverter, 1/30th of a second at f/22, ISO 500.

Mike

www.mikespinak.com