Favorite Places – Newfoundland
The captain skillfully eased his lobster boat close to the leeward side of a small island about a half a mile out of Witless Bay on the Avalon Peninsula, a jut of land that dangles, like a hanging chad, from the southeast corner of Newfoundland. Pointing the bow into the current, he steadied the boat as the ebb tide sucked the ocean out from underneath us. Meanwhile, we adjusted our apertures, shutter speeds, and auto focus settings then aimed our lenses upward at the hundreds of Atlantic puffins adorning a grassy cliff that towered over the starboard gunwale. Nesting puffins poked their colorful orange beaks out of their burrows in the soft, crumbly soil. Courting pairs stood on tussocks and ledges alternately throwing their heads backward and flashing the brilliant yellow linings of their mouths at one another – the puffin’s form of spooning. Overhead, against a clear blue sky, a fury of stubby wings frantically flapping and tangerine-colored webbed feet tucked way back on stocky little bodies extended from the cliff like a phalanx of ants streaming from an anthill as puffins winged out to sea and as many returned some, but certainly not all, with hauls of capelin or krill or hake or herring clamped in their beaks for their hungry chicks.
I braced my back against the side of the wheelhouse, handheld my camera and shot wide open at f/4 with a 1.4x on my Canon 300mm f/2.8 IS lens, on aperture priority, evaluative metering, and +1 exposure compensation. Autofocus was set on AI Servo with CF 17 set to 2 (13 point expanded activation) to enable me to keep the birds in focus. I was hoping to get a shot of a puffin in flight with a beakfull of fish.
Bull Caribou with Harem
Canon EOS3 with Canon 300mm f/2.8 L USM lens
1/90″ at f/4, Kodak E100G
evaluative metering, aperture priority
Gitzo G1340 with Wimberley head
scan from a 35mm slide on a Nikon Coolscan 4000
Posted by Gustav under Newfoundland,Participants' Photos | Comments (8)
