I photographed this cape cormorant at the Cape of Good Hope, the southwestern tip of Africa. There is a vantage point looking straight down from a sheer cliff that allows a spectacular view of the patterns made by a turbulent sea crashing on the rocky shore. Below me, dozens of cormorants navigated the intense wind beautifully, but they are incredibly fast flyers. With patience, advanced autofocus, and a fast frame rate, I was able to capture a few birds with their wing and tail feathers spread. Because I used a 500mm focal length and I focused on the birds, depth of field was not enough to render the background detail of the sea with critical sharpness. Therefore, to reproduce what I saw with my eyes, I took many shots of the ocean and combined one of them with the cormorant. My settings for the bird picture were 1/1250, f/7.1, and 500 ISO.
0 Comments