This is the final batch of images from my trip to La Jolla this spring. (I have previous posted landscape images, color and monochrome seal photos, and pelican and plant abstracts from the same trip). It has taken me a pathetically long time to edit my images from my trip. I came back with thousands of frames. Making matters worse, many of the frames are quite similar with regard to subject matter and composition. More bluntly: I made a lot of portraits of California Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis californicus). Something about the combination of interesting birds — with their distinctive breeding plumage, nice light, a distant background that I could blur into nothingness with a long lens, and an ugly dirt-and-guano foreground screamed “portrait.” Multiply by five days, and you get the idea. But, I did make some very nice portraits. The pelicans have wonderful sense of character.
La Jolla is not just about pelican portraits, of course. The funky pelicans lend themselves to abstract and semi-abstract images.
The flight shooting was great as well. I got a chance to try out my new 70-200 f/4 lens (a medium telephoto lens). It is deadly for pelicans in flight, and it was a pleasure shooting with a lens that has so much more depth of field than my typical 500mm f/4.
The gulls were great as well. Here are a couple of my favorites, including images of Heermann’s Gull (Larus heermanni), American Herring Gull (Larus smithsonianus) and Western Gull (Larus occidentalis).
I couldn’t resist a couple of images of the Double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus). They exhibit a marvelous tension between the humorous (crests) and the severe or sinister (beak and eyes).
Here is a gallery of all of my shorebird images from the trip, plus a daisy image to boot (if you’re viewing this from the RSS feed, this will look strange. Click through to see the gallery in its proper form). As you browse, notice how even among similar-seaming pelican portraits, there are subtle differences in the bird’s plumage and beak coloration:
