I mentioned in my last entry that the sight of Dalmatian pelicans in flight is magnificent.
We got out on the boats before dawn each morning. On the second and third days, dense fog was out on the lake. Despite this, even in near darkness as blue hour came on, the pelicans found our boat, appearing as dark shapes out of the gloom. They seem to be able to hear the boat from some distance (or maybe they feel its vibrations?), and they found us unerringly.
It was only on the first morning that we had a sliver of sunlight as dawn came up. On the other two mornings, dense fog prevented any light from coming through. I managed to catch a pelican flying through the light on that first morning.
The great thing about the fog was that it came with glossy, still water. This gave beautiful reflections as the birds flew past, and no horizon (or any background) could be seen.
Occasionally, the birds seem to take advantage of ground effect, gliding so low over the water surface that their ventral feathers almost touch the water.
Sometimes, they would bank coming past the boat, and their primary feathers grazed the water surface, leaving a trail behind.
Occasionally, the sun broke through: we had the best of this on the second day, later in the morning and in the afternoon. The pelicans flying against the snow-capped Kirkini mountains behind looked especially magnificent (see also the picture in postcard 1 of this series).
Occasionally, there were enough pelicans around the boat so that as one landed, it almost crashed into another. Mostly they missed each other as one ducked out of the way, but not always.
There are occasions when they can look less than magnificent, even inelegant, especially just after they have taken off.
Something I could not resist was some slow shutter speed pictures. My idea was to get pictures that conveyed the overall movements of the birds, with wings in motion, dissolving into motion blur, while the head remained still. I'd planned for this in advance and had brought a 3-stop neutral density filter with me for my 70-200mm lens. In the event, the light was dull enough at times for this not to be needed. After a bit of testing, I settled on 1/15 sec as a shutter speed that gave enough blur on the wings, with a reasonable chance of getting a sharp head.
This is an occasion where shooting "statistically" is the only option. That is to say, I set my Alpha-1 to 15 frames per second and panned with the birds as they came past and landed on the water. I know from experience with aircraft that even though this is a low-yield procedure, there will be sharp shots among the mass of blur. I call this "statistical" shooting because I know that if I shoot enough, there will be sharp shots.* It's just a question of numbers. And for the ones that are not sharp – they are only pixels, so they can be deleted!
*I know I should not get annoyed when people describe this as "spray and pray", but I can’t help it. This wretched phrase implies that you have no control over the process and it is only through prayer that you might be granted something by a capricious god. This is emphatically not the case with the way I work. I know from long experience that the only way to get the kinds of shots that I'm after is to make many shots and then select those that are sharp (culling the images in PhotoMechanic makes this a fast and easy process). It is no more "spray and pray" than a miner, knowing there is gold in a river, pans through many, many gallons of water to find flakes of gold.