A boater who was so captivated by his cellphone that he apparently didn't see a humpback whale right next to him stunned a California photographer who snapped shots of the man texting.

Eric Smith posted one of the images on Instagram for his friends and lightly admonished the boater for missing out on the whale and her calf off Redondo Beach, Calif.

"A sign of the times," Smith wrote on the posting. "Hey dude! Stop texting. There's an enormous humpback whale two feet from your boat."

"Through the course of five or six shots, he never moved, and the whale was so close to the boat, I was like, you must put the phone down and look," Smith told a CBS News affiliate in Los Angeles.

"This is not about one guy on a boat. It's a commentary on society today," he said.

Smith said he was "roughly 50 feet" from the man on the sailboat when the mother whale popped up beside the boat.