When I think of pelicans, I think of Florida. So, when I noticed a number of pelicans floating around on the Arkansas River in Little Rock, I was both surprised and elated. Naturally, I had to get some photos of them.
Had I taken this image now, I would have used my 100-400mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter to give me a focal length of up to 560mm. Unfortunately, at the time I took this photograph, I had not yet acquired that equipment. All I had was a 400mm fixed focal length lens and no teleconverter. That 400mm lens was long and heavy, which eliminated handholding it. So, I attached it to my tripod but left the ball head loosened so I could swing the lens wherever I needed it.
I’m not sure how many photos I took that evening, but it was a lot. Most were not very good. They were blurred, or the birds were too far away, or some other issue. But, this one, though, was my favorite. I liked how these three pelicans seemed to follow each other up and down the river like three amigos.
When I got home and processed the file, there were three issues I needed to address. The first was the significant amount of wasted space along the edges of the frame. The second issue was that I was so absorbed by these three birds that I failed to notice a couple of other pelicans that were cut off on the right edge of the frame. Cropping the image quickly resolved both problems.
The final issue was that the birds tended to blend in with the background and the water. To correct that, I added a duplicate layer to the color image and converted the layer to black and white. Of course, this converted everything, including the pelicans, to black and white, which didn’t solve the original problem. To do that, I used the brush tool to remove the black and white layer on the birds in the top layer revealing the pelicans in the bottom color layer. This provided an excellent way of separating the pelicans from the rest of the image and drawing attention to them.
One little interesting bit of trivia. The pelican is the official state bird for. . .Louisiana, not Florida. The official state bird of Florida is the mockingbird. Why that is I have no idea.