I just finished up my series of workshops and private clients at Nickerson Beach in NY. I met up with old and new friends and we all had some wonderful photo opportunities. We also dealt with difficult lighting conditions on some of the days, but our adventures were all filled with great fun.
I will be working with the groups on Sunday sharing lots of my Photoshop techniques and reviewing their images. I have found that doing the Photoshop sessions via Zoom after the workshop allows the clients to look through their images and find the photos they want to share and/or ask questions about.. And best of all, everyone has a ring side seat <wink>.
Here are just a few from my time at Nickerson. All photographed handheld with the Sony Alpha a9 Mirrorless Digital Camera and the Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS Lens.
Above is a Black Skimmer family, showing off the first of the season skimmer chick. The proud parents took turns watching after the young chick. Thanks to a nice woman on the beach for sharing the location with me and my clients so that we were able to see and photograph it. I also captured the entire bodies of both skimmers, but liked the more intimate crop of this one.
This American Oystercatcher was brooding it’s young chick, if you look closely you can see the head and bill of the chick peeking through the back feathers, trying to stay close to mom’s touch. This image was captured just before sunset and the lighting was lovely. Two juvenile Common Terns are resting in the background.
This American Oystercatcher and young chick were one of our favorites to photograph. This young curious chick was a hoot. I liked the intimate moment here even though I clipped the tail of the adult the image still had some merit.
This Common Tern chick came out from behind the grasses with it’s beak fully open, guns a blazin’ looking to be fed. I’m always amazed at how they can recognize the sound of their parent through all the ruckus going on in the colony. We had some beautiful early morning light that cast a lovely, pale-pink tone on the sand. I had to reduce the saturation of the beak and feet as they were practically glowing! With early morning light I often move slightly to the side to eliminate my shadow from hitting the bird; I am careful not to over expose the chests of the birds.
As I mentioned before we had some flat light due to clouds and even slight rain. Eventually the sun started to come out which created a nice soft box. This lighting made it easy to capture some of the chicks in assorted poses; you didn’t need to worry about working on sun angle as they moved all about the colony.
I wasn’t really working on flight shots when I captured this one but the grasses at the base made it hard to resist. On average, I like to use shutter speeds upwards of 1/1250 second for flight.