'A Wonderful Bird is a Pelican' (Poet Odgen Nash)*

'Its Beak Can Hold More Than Its Belican' ;-)) Three brown pelican

line up for dinner near the mouth of an outlet which feeds a slough

(and brings numerous small fish, on which they feed), Elkhorn

Slough, Moss Landing, California, one of California's Ten Most

Scenic Wonders, per travel guru Arthur Frommer. Your ratings and

critiques are invited and most welcome. If you rate harshly or very

critically, please submit a helpful and constructive comment/Please

share your superior photographic knowledge to help improve my

photography. Thanks! Enjoy! John

I'm a bird shooter.

Look out Hung Ton!

Actually, this is almost my first try at shooting birds/they're close by but I've had 'other fish to fry' half way around the world. They're 10-12 miles from my doorstep or so, and today there were so many pelicans, herons and gulls in a bunch feeding, I couldn't separate them to get a good shot of them in any sort of 'pattern' except for this shot.

I hope you like this.

This is a crop.

John (Crosley)

Thanks for your comments on Early Ducks. Always appreciated and all advice and critiques accepted in good spirit.

I did not edit as I was so happy to have these two birds arrive, I just wanterd to share.

Great to see another shooting birds with a camera. Champion!!

It has been suggested that somehow, given that these three pelicans appear so neatly lined up, that I somehow accomplished that using Photoshop or some other photo editing program.

Not so.

This entire photo's composition occurred naturally and was a camera capture with no compositional manipulation.

Such things certainly are possible, though with difficulty on water of such type, but I don't even know how to do such things well enough to display, or perhaps even at all. Photoshop is a wonderful tool for those who have to 'make' images that are predefined to fit a 'concept' -- say for an advertising campaign, for which there is not and may never be a suitable, naturally-occurring image.

But until I change my mind (maybe never), I am too busy trying to find naturally-occurring circumstances that fill the bill for me of being 'interesting' and aesthetically pleasing without the aid of the wonders of 'image editing' for my compositions.

That being said, this image did have some slight sharpening and some contrast/brightness adjustment, much as a film printing machine might have 'adjusted' its output with a computer at a big box store as it printed 'film'.

John (Crosley)

The composition and timing of this photo, although a 'nature' photo, is very much similar to the 'street photographs' which I am more noted for shooting.

The composition of this photo depended on the exact ability to recognize, not only the impending lineup of 'threes' of the three pelicans, which lasted just more than an instant, until one or two of them veered off in different directions, but also to catch the 'gull' in the upper left corner of the frame, for an 'accent' to draw the eye away from the centered subject and to 'unbalance' the photo just a little bit -- and to create interest.

Such an instance happens but once in a lifetime and probably never will repeat; the opportunity lies elsewhere for other captures. As such, this capture is entirely 'original', no matter what raters say. And the 'originality' is a result not only of 'quick timing' but also of 'skill' in waiting for the exact time to release the shutter to catch that fast-flying bird, upper left in about the proper place for the frame.

Not every frame is as well-executed; in fact such frames are rare, but the object is not -- as point and shoot photographers seek -- to make every frame stand out as a printable photograph, but to make just one out of a bunch to be noteworthy and original.

As such, those who know my work, will thus recognize this as quite similar in style to other works of mine, which depend on composition and skillful timing.

John (Crosley)