Galapagos - My first time there and it was totally amazing! - Day one

For many years now I have been talking to other photographer friends and my photo tour guests about their favorite places that they have visited. Consistently the answer came back - Galapagos. It has been on my bucket list for a long time, and last month marked my first visit to these amazing islands. After spending more than a week there and seeing what we saw, I expect to be back there many times in the years to come. 

Actually, I have already added another photo tour to Galapagos for 2027, which you can see HERE. I just added it to my web site about a week ago and it is already half sold out.

What makes this area so special is that every island (or different sides of the larger islands) has something totally different from the previous stop. The terrain is different, the wildlife is different, and the photo opportunities are plentiful.

Today is the first of numerous blog posts from the Galapagos trip last month, and we start from the beginning. Well...actually we did a day tour of Quito, Ecuador before we headed to the islands, but I will save that for another time.

After landing on Santa Cruz island, we were transported from the airport to the coast, where we would get on board our boat. As we approached the dock, we stopped to see this beautiful view of the water. It was gorgeous!

We checked out our rooms on the boat, met the crew, had a nice lunch, and then headed back onto the island to go see the Giant Tortoises. 

The Galapagos islands are most known for the Giant tortoises and the Blue-footed boobies. On this first day, we got to spend hours with the tortoises and were thrilled to see so many of them. The light was perfect and I encouraged my photo tour guests to get down low (those that could) to get photos at their eye level.  I was using the Canon R5 Mark II with the RF 24-105mm lens and took most of the photos as low and wide as I could.

As I mentioned, we had overcast skies which was perfect for photographing these guys without harsh sunlight and shadows.

The Giant tortoises can grow up to 600 pounds and live as long as 150 years. I took this group shot to show the size of the animal compared to us. I also took individual images of all my guests with the animals.

After shooting many images with the RF 24-105mm lens, I switched to the Canon RF 100-500mm lens to get in nice and close. 

I encouraged everyone to shoot in burst mode to get nice photos showing their movement.  We all decided that Steven Spielberg must have used the face of the tortoise as his inspiration for "ET".

There must have been 40 of these tortoises in the area that we visited, and we had the place to ourselves, which allowed for images without any other people in the shot. We watched as they ate...

...and went for a swim. 

It was really fun to watch them move around and capture them in their environment. After hearing about these creatures for so long, it was awesome to actually be in the Galapagos photographing them.

Just before leaving the area, it was time for me to get my portrait with the tortoise. It was an amazing start to an incredible week in the Galapagos. Stay tuned for so many more photos, above and below the water!

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