What I Did on My Vacation #5

Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend.  During the course of our lunch, my Galapagos Islands photos became a topic.  He wanted to know why I was not putting in technical data on my photos so he was curious about how the photos were taken and what post processing was done on most of the photos that I have posted.

As to how all the photos were taken, they were taken with my Nikon D3, set at variable ISO (up to ISO 1,600 with a minimum shutter speed of 1/180^th of a second), a Nikon 28-300mm, f/3.5-5.6 lens and NO flash (not allowed in the Galapagos Islands).   I also often resorted to using automatic bracketing (three shots at one-stop increments) to make sure that I got the photo was properly exposed. 

 Because there are so many animals that have almost no fear of humans, you can more-or-less shop for your shot.   As an example for the first photo of the iguana posted last Friday, I walked up and down a row of four iguanas that were perched on rocks.  I was looking for a simple, pleasing background and light falling on the iguana’s face.  After “shopping” for several minutes, I selected the one that you saw.  Normally, in wild live photography, you just cannot do that and that is one reason that I really admire wildlife photographers, especially bird photographers.

As to post-processing, it has been done totally in Lightroom 3 (Camera RAW).  The processing generally includes making sure that I have a good white and black point set, tweaking color hue, saturation and luminosity, adjusting clarity and vibrance, using various tone curves, cropping, using post-crop vignetting and occasionally using the adjustment brush to lighten or darken various parts of a photo.  The overall adjustment time would probably be less that two minutes on all the photographs presented.

Today’s topic:  BIRDS.  Following is my usual disclaimer:  I AM NOT A BIRID PHOTOGRAPHER; I TAKE BAD BIRD PHOTOGRAPHS.  But, I felt that I had to include birds because they are such an important part of the Galapagos Islands experience.

I chose the first photo of a Blue-Footed Booby because it illustrates the lack of fear that the birds have of humans and shows how hard the light was during many of our hikes on the islands.  These birds have a tendency to stand (and nest) on the designated paths and will generally not move when you walk by them.  In this photo, I am about four feet in front of the bird and the legs are about two feet behind the bird. 

Second photo is one of the blue feet of the Blue-Footed Booby.  I really wanted a photo of a Blue-Footed Booby doing its dance (we saw it several times on our first visit to the Galapagos Islands) but I never saw any dance.  In the photo, I wanted to show-off what makes the bird unique.

The final photo is of a duck (forgot the name) taken in the highlands on an overcast day.  I really liked how the bold, vivid colors of the duck contrasted with the soft, muted colors of the reflection in the water.

Enjoy.