Pelicans and Swans...Sort of

senorjaxsenorjax Registered Users Posts: 298 Major grins
edited March 16, 2011 in Wildlife
When I was younger and much more stoopid I enjoyed giving my wife a hard time about her animal photos. She'd say she got a shot of a moose and I'd say cool, where? She'd say, that brown spot right there and I'd say moose have ears and antlers and long legs, seriously unlike the small brown blob way in the back of the photo. I've learned a lot since then.


I was reminded of those days yesterday when I had a chance to do some long range shooting of my own. I heard that there were Tundra Swans in the neighborhood so my daughter and I went to check 'em out. The best I can say is that we were in the same valley as the swans, and we could definitely hear them. Binocs did a fair job of bringing them in but the longest lens I have is the 70-300 and even at the long end they weren't much more than white dots. This shot is at 270mm on a crop body.

1218063846_BzLQS-L.jpg

Cropped at 100% the birds still didn't fill much of the frame, and sharpness was unusably awful, so I mucked with them a bunch in PS, trying to salvage what would otherwise be tossers. Ended up with images very low on realism and high on artsyness. No apologies for that though, the originals were bland, blurry and blah.

American White Pelicans
1218360548_LzD4E-XL.jpg

And the Tundra Swans
1218447702_zxRSJ-XL.jpg

I did bring home one nearly normal shot. Ducks on the marsh. If they would've gotten within a hundred yards of me I may have been able to tell you what kind. Oops, looks like there are some Canada Geese there as well.
1218064421_gSdRD-XL.jpg
Jay

Comments

Sign In or Register to comment.