0003 Episode Three
American White Pelicans
This episode is about photographing the American White Pelican. One of the United State’s largest birds. Terry talks about how to find these birds and how to photograph them.
The American White Pelican is one of the largest birds in North America with its almost nine-foot wingspan, amazingly, it’s a magnificent flyer. Due to habitat loss, this bird’s population dropped in the early part of the 20thcentury. But since the 1970s’ there has been a substantial increase in population due to this bird’s ability to adapt.
Learning as much as you can about a species is a great way to understand your subject before you go out to photograph them.
Such as with the American White Pelican, with the knowledge of their migratory patterns and eating preferences, you can gain the knowledge of where to find these birds and better predict their behaviors. Thus, increasing the odds of getting better photographs.
Here at Anthony Chabot Regional Park in Castro Valley, California, the American White Pelican calls this place home for at least part of the year. The white Pelican winters in warmer climates like California, Florida, and Mexico then it migrates to the northern great plains and Canada to breed.
When the Pelicans are working to capture their next meal, they usually are seen flying about 10 to 15 feet above the water’s surface looking for fish activity.
The American White Pelican can be found often working in pairs or in groups, collaborating together to capture their next meal. The technique they use is to work in teams to swim and drive fish to the shores into shallow water where the fish are much easier to catch.
While the fisherman have carbon fiber fishing rods and state-of-the-art lures, the Pelicans have a just a long beak and an extensible pouch as their tools to capture fish with. Cruising quietly on the water, they dip their heads underwater and can quickly scoop up the unsuspecting fish.
Stocking alpine lakes usually happens by air. The workers pick up the fish at a local fish hatchery and then load up tanks that are hauled on to a helicopter. The helicopter flies low along the predetermined mountain lakes with the tanks hanging below the helicopter, the pilot then goes into a hovering pattern. By remote, the pilot can easily press a button the fish are simply dropped into the lakes.
As you can imagine, the fish are a bit stunned when they are dropped into a lake but most survive.
In local community lakes, the fish arrive in a truck that is driven to the edge of the lake and connected to a large tube that extends down into the lake. A few baffles are switched and the mountain trout go tumbling down the tube. At the end of that tube, the tube becomes a trough and fish can be seen flipping around as they splash out into their new home.
This delivery event also stuns the fish and they react by swimming slowly in the shallow waters. This is where the American White Pelican takes advantage of the disoriented fish and arrive to their very own Thanksgiving dinner table.
A few days can pass after a fish stocking event and the mountain trout or bass can still be feeling the effects of the transport and from the flushing down the large black tube. The Pelicans know this and are swimming the shallow waters every morning capturing the fish that don’t yet have their act together.
Photographing the American White Pelican does present some challenges. This is a large bird as we noted earlier and they are mostly pure white. There is a small black edge of the underside of their wings that can only be visible when flying. Their long beaks are yellow and some pink can be found around their eyes.
An all-white or mostly white bird presents some challenges to the photographer. And as you can imagine, this revolves around exposure.
In order to get white feathers to be exposed correctly you must have just enough exposure to give detail to the feathers, but not so much that the feathers burn to pure white.
The best way to do this is to make sure your camera has highlight warnings turned on. This is also sometimes referred to as blinkies to some people. In order to turn this feature on in your camera, you may have to consult the owner’s manual or the internet, But I can tell you how to set this up for most Nikon, Canon, and Sony cameras.
First up Nikon:
This is the brand that I use every day so I know how to get to it easily. Turn your camera on, and press the menu button. Along the left side of the menu are sub-menus and the top one has a universal sideways triangle “play” icon. That is your playback menu. In this set of menus, you are going to choose how you view your images on the back screen of your camera.
Click on this menu and scroll down a few spots until you get to the Display Options menu. Once you click on this, you should see several options of things that either has a check in a box or an empty box next to a function. You’ll see things like Focus point, None (image only) RGB Histogram, Highlights, etc. The one you want to check is the Highlights box. To do that you have to toggle to the right on the main Multi Selector button – that’s the flat multi-angle toggle pad on the back of the camera. Simply pressing the OK button will not work, you have to move the selector to the right and you will see a check in the box. These are all toggle switches, so moving to the right turns them on, or checks the box, and to the right again will uncheck the box.
Once you are done selecting, now click OK and you have set your playback view to now include the highlight warning view.
To actually use this feature, when looking at the images on the back of your camera, Get an image on the back of your camera by taking a test shot or hitting the play button near the top left of the back of the camera. Move that same multi-selector dial-up this time and it will scroll through the different views you have selected. Most photographers will have the main screen where the image and some detail, like date, time and filename show up, one more press up and you will show just the image with no information and another toggle up will show you the highlight warning view.
It is this view that will help you determine that you indeed have the best exposure on a white feathered bird-like the American White Pelican.
Before we go into how to read this screen, let me tell you briefly how to set it up for the other cameras.
If you shoot Canon, they call it Highlight Alert. In the menu, scroll across the top until you get to the play menus. Those will typically be in blue and have that universal sideways triangle play icon. It is usually the second or third play icon. What you are looking for is the Highlight Alert. You scroll down to that and hit the select button to enable Highlight alert. Now you are good to go.
On the Sony cameras, it’s a little different in that Sony uses the “Zebra” system. The zebra system comes directly from the video shooting industry so since the Sony cameras are mirrorless, it makes sense to work this way. In the menu, scroll until you find zebra setting and scroll down and turn Zebra Display to On. You also have the ability to fine-tune your zebras from 70% on up. For most still photography uses and for shooting white-feathered birds, put your zebra on 100%.
Now when you see your image on the back it will have zebra lines instead of blinking highlights.
Either way, the blinking signifies you have highlights in your image that are over-exposed. Meaning that any part of the image that is blinking, will not have any detail in those highlights. No detail in these parts will mean there is no texture in that part of the image and won’t be as nice as if you took a second to change your exposure, by making the whole image a bit darker to eliminate those blinking highlights.
Having the correct exposure is very important for photographing white birds like the American White Pelican.
You want to get all of their feathers to be visible.
Another thing that happens when shooting white birds is, to get the proper exposure on the bird’s feathers, your image has to be darker. Which means, the background will likely be darker.
I’m over at Lake Chabot early this morning photographing the American White Pelican. This is just after the fish plant yesterday where 1,000 pounds of mountain trout were stocked at the lake.
I have been watching a couple of pelicans move around the marina, and oh one just dipped his head and caught a fish. Come on, turn this way….
No such luck, he turned away and quickly tilted back his head and swallowed the fish whole, flipping and flopping into his belly.
This is one of those action moments that most wildlife photographers look for. Getting shots of the animal Actually catching and eating a meal. I wasn’t in the best position for that shot but I’ll keep trying.
What I have been shooting with some success, are the Pelicans flying and landing.
As we talked about early on, these are large birds, Up to nine-foot wingspan. Watching Pelicans coming in for a landing can be quite hilarious. They can sometimes look so awkward as they land their huge bodies on the water kind of like a sputtering plane coming in for a landing.
Awkward and graceful all at the same time.
The sunlight is just rising up in front of me and reflecting off the light overcast of the morning. This is creating a backlight to the birds from the direction I’m standing.
What I like to do when I’m photographing is look for the best light. In this instance, I could be on either side of the narrow part of the marina and I chose to backlight my subject. Mostly because of the overcast light will make filling in the shadows side of the birds quite nicely. I don’t always go for backlighting but today this looks pretty good.
Here comes one now…. Oh, how cool is that, as he landed he skidded on the lake for a few feet and it kind of looked like he was waterskiing. The backlighting is also highlighting the water droplets when they get kicked up, which comes across really well in the photographs.
When I first got here, I checked my highlight warning and saw that I was seeing the blinking highlights just on the head and shoulder of the birds. Since its low light of the morning, I am shooting at ISO 3200 and sometimes up to ISO 10,000. I’m doing this because I need to get a high enough shutter speed to stop the action of the bird, flying, landing, or splashing in the water. My shutter speed is set at 1/3200 of a second. As with most of my wildlife, I’m shooting wide open, which means shooting at 2.8 for my 300 mm and f/4 for my 600 millimeters.
When shooting birds in action, my primary concern is a fast enough shutter speed. I figure I can work with some noise reduction on the images on the computer, later. But if I don’t get the birds sharp to begin with, I’ll have nothing to work with.
This wide aperture gives me the best shot at getting softer out of focus background. I find that if I make sure my focus is correct on my subject’s eye, then whether part of the wing is out of focus or not, is disregarded by most viewers of the image. So get those eyes sharp.
Also when I am shooting like this, I am always considering the background. I don’t want anything to distract from my subject. Not the marina, not random patches of light, I even try to keep other birds that are not part of my story out of the photographs whenever possible.
Check out my web site imagelight.com for some of the sample images I shot here today staring the American White Pelican. These birds make fantastic subjects and they might just be waiting for you at your own nearby lake or waterway.
