A mass of gannets

I photographed this mass of cape gannets at the Lambert's Bay Bird Island Nature Reserve in South Africa. The birds fight for every square inch of ground they can grab for a nest. What is particularly remarkable about this reserve is that the local authorities built a two-story structure for tourists and photographers from which to view the colony so you can get an elevated perspective. That afforded me this great angle to show the density of birds. I took this in 2001 when I was still shooting film, and I tried for several hours to capture birds in flight with the manual Mamiya RZ 67 camera. I only got one decent shot in focus, so most of the images I liked were pictures like this. In 2017, by contrast, I photographed the northern cape gannets at Cape St. Mary's in Newfoundland with a Canon 1Dx Mark II at 14 frames per second and super fast autofocus, and I got dozens of great shots of birds in flight. My settings for this picture were unrecorded, but they were probably 1/400, f/11, and I used a 250mm Mamiya medium telephoto. The size of the slides I used to shoot are 6x7cm or 2 1/4 x 2/ 3/4 inches instead of 35mm. The transparencies were then scanned by a high-end Imacon scanner.