On our third day in the Galapagos Islands, our group woke up to a whole new environment, even though we were still off the shore of Isabela Island.. As we came out of our rooms on the boat, we could see that this western side of the island was covered in endless lava rock.
After breakfast, we took a short zodiac ride over to the island and did a walk through the lava field to see the terrain up close.
After our walk, we got back in our zodiac boats and cruised along the shoreline in search of wildlife. We were all excited to see more penguins.
We watched as this penguin hopped up on a rock and then jumped into the water.
Just like the days before, we were all captivated by the colors of the crabs, and had to get more photos of these creatures.
Weirdly enough, as we were cruising along the coastline, we saw this feral cat that swam from one rock to another. That is an animal I did not expect to see in the Galapagos. It turns out that people brought cats as pets many years ago, and now the Charles Darwin Foundation is trying to eradicate them from the islands since they pose a threat to the native wildlife.
The subject we were hoping for the most was the Blue-footed booby. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is the bird that the islands are most known for. We took photos of this one on the rocks, but hoped to see many more.
It was not long after we saw the booby on the rocks, that we came across an area where the Blue-footed boobies were dive bombing for fish.
Watching these birds diving in formation reminded me a lot of the US Navy Blue Angels flying in their formations.
We watched and captured endless photos of these birds as they repeated this pattern over and over again. I really liked it when they exited the water, since it showed action and showed their blue feet really prominently.
For all these photos, I was using the
Canon R5 Mark II with the
RF 100-500mm lens. I had the camera set to high speed burst mode and kept my shutter speed to a minimum of 1/2000 sec.
Capturing photos of them in flight was fun, but the most fun was hearing them splash down into the water just feet from us..
We captured photos of them flying in all directions...
...but one of my favorite photos was this one, when one of the boobies flew directly at us. The Canon R5 Mark II locked in perfectly on the eyes of the bird and I got this shot. I love the intense look on it's face, the wing position, and the water droplets that are flying out from behind the bird. This would have been a much harder photo to take with the old DSLR cameras, but with the subject and eye detection of the Canon mirrorless cameras, it allowed me to capture the eyes of the bird perfectly.
More to come from Galapagos...including some underwater photos and video.
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