About the Image(s)

Most of the times I have seen sea otters in deeper water, kelp beds exposed to the open ocean swells. In this case we were moving between the BC coast and a close island when we came upon a lone otter. He swam along parallel to the boat for a while. When the engine was cut, he did lazy laps around us for 30 minutes, sometimes as close as 30 yards. It was 2:30 in the afternoon with full sun so the lighting was pretty harsh.

Nikon Z9 400 mm, 1/2500 sec., ISO 64, f/2.8

I ran this image through DxO Mark but there was very little noise to remove and only slight sharpening. I made some white balance corrections, cropped and slight dehaze slider adjustment in Lightroom Classic before exporting. The original showed some front focus. I did a little targeted sharpening of his camera left eye and side of the head to even out the focus.